Customer Reviews

Quick and Easy Korean Cooking (Gourmet Cook Book Club Selection)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ok, so this book is not a scholarly dissertation on Korean cooking. In fact, au contraire, it is extremely minimalistic. Most recipes contain a 2 sentence intro, less than 10 ingredients, and less than 5 steps, and among the most exotic ingredients it calls for is korean chile paste. It is not difficult to see grandmas in Middle America pick up the book, and cook through the entire book.

There is a fair representation of recipes from the familiar like korean barbecued beef ribs, to the unusual like black rice porridge. If you are looking for the definitive tome on korean cooking, this is not the book. But if you are a beginner and/or just looking for new recipes to broaden your weeknight repertoire, this book will more than do justice in introducing simple but authentic korean flavors.

The author fulfills her promise by providing recipes that truly are quick and easy to prepare. There can be a little decrease in flavor and complexity that comes along with a quicker preparation, but few people can prepare large complex meals every night. For the small amount of time invested in preparation, the author provides unique and delicious dishes. Two small downsides are (1) with all the beautiful photographs, there are not photos of many dishes and (2) there are some ingredients that are not available in most supermarkets, but are available on the Internet (and she provides sources in the book).

Overall, a great book that delivers what the title promises!

It was when I saw this available that I realized two things: 1) I don't have any Korean cookbooks, just a smattering of Korean recipes in other books, and 2) I like kalbi, so this ought to be good. And you know what? It is.

This is actually part of a series Chronicle Books has been putting out for some years that, as far as I can tell, began with Madhur Jaffrey's Quick & Easy Indian Cooking and mostly focuses on Asian cuisine. It's not a deep introduction; while it's perfectly readable, it doesn't go into deep history or tell many of the stories behind the dishes (which among other things leads to no acknowledgement of the obvious similarities between gimbap and sushi). But it does give all the basics of a Korean meal, with a selection of typical and fairly simple recipes with lots of gorgeous food photography, including a half dozen or so different types of the ubiquitous kimchi (spicy pickled vegetables).

I'm a little concerned about the value for price; for what Chronicle is charging for their books these days, this would be fine for a hardcover, but it seems like even allowing for inflation over the last couple of years their cover price is a little high. If you don't have any books on Korean food, this is a great way to get into it; just make sure you buy it at a discount.

I really enjoyed this book. It's well put together, the recipes are simple and quick to prepare, the photography is beautiful, and the dishes are quite tasty. Is this the definitive authority on Korean cuisine? Probably not. But if you'd like to get your feet wet working with Korean flavors, this might be a good choice for you.

There's a nice variety of recipes here. The barbecued pork ribs are wonderful -- I served them with the green onion pancakes, also very tasty. I guess I'm lucky: I live in an area where there are a number of Asian markets, and most supermarkets have an excellent international foods section, so finding the ingredients for these dishes isn't an issue. You might find you need to substitute -- you won't get exactly the same flavors or results, but you'll probably come close enough.

I'm giving this five stars because it succeeds at its intended purpose: a well presented collection of simple recipes that allow a home cook to experience Korean foods without heading for a Korean restaurant.

I've owned the author's previous book, "Eating Korean: From Barbecue to Kimchi, Recipes from My Home", for something over a year, and it's become my first choice whenever I'm looking for details on how to prepare a favorite Korean dish. When I saw "Quick and Easy Korean" available at Amazon, I was curious to see how it compared to her previous work. The brief answer: It's a different sort of book.

"Eating Korean" is both a detailed cookbook and a narrative of author Cecelia Hae-Jin Lee's life, a popular format for many recent cookbooks, and one that works well for the author. The recipes are given a context in addition to detailed preparation directions. This volume- "Quick and Easy Korean Cooking"- falls more into the category of the Beautiful Cookbook, a format in which the primary focus is the food photography and the book design. The print is smaller that you'd like if you were reading from a cookbook lying on your kitchen counter top, and the sans-serif type a bit harder to read than a good traditional font like Bookman or Times.

There's a glossary of common Korean ingredients in the fornt of the book, but no illustrations. It makes good reading, but it's not a lot of help for the novice shopper. As for being "Quick and Easy"- the recipes are no faster to prepare, or any easier than those in the author's previous cookbook. I suspect the title was one chosen by the publisher, given the large number of cookbooks that promise the novice cook five-star results with minimal time and effort. While there are plenty of recipes to be found here, This book is designed largely to appeal to those who enjoy buying and browsing cookbooks as much, or more, than cooking from them.

And speaking of the recipes themselves: There's a good deal of overlap with Hae-Jin Lee's earlier book, and the photos, beautiful as they are, are not as good as the illustrations in "Eating Korean" when it comes to showing how the dish is prepared or served. Instead, they're done in a close-up, soft-focus style I like to think of as Boudoir Food Photography. Beautiful to look at, but not as useful to the cook as they might otherwise be.

I don't want the reader to think that I'm slamming this book. It's a very good cookbook, with a lot of excellent recipes, many of which I've already tried. But if you're looking for your first Korean cookbook, I would say that Hae-Jin Lee's earlier "Eating Korean" would be a better choice. "Quick and Easy Korean Cooking" might be a useful purchase later on for the additional recipes it offers. Even better, it would make an excellent gift for the foodie in your life who enjoys cookbooks that are as much a treat for the eye as for the palate.

This is not a definitive, comprehensive work on Korean cooking. It is, however, an easy to follow, accessible book for those who want to try their hand at cooking Korean food at home. The recipes are short and to the point, and the color photos are fantastic.

You will need access to an Asian market, or order a lot of unique ingredients on-line. After the up-front expense of stocking your pantry with these condiments, you will find that almost every recipe in the book relies on the same basic flavorings, so you will not have to keep running to the store every time you want to cook something, except for fresh ingredients. My only quibble with the recipes is that I thought they were a bit on the bland side, but that may have been intentional - you can always put more spice in, but you can't take it out. Overall, a nice little book that I would recommend.

My recent foray into the spicy world of Asian cooking is what immediately attracted me to this book. Korean gastronomy has essentially remained a cipher to me; even as I immersed myself in the splendid traditions of Thai cooking, the spicier foods from China's Sichuan Province, and food from the broad region of South-east Asia that contains India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Tibet. Korean food is distinctive in its use of chile pepper paste as an ubiquitous spice, in its creative use of noodles and barbeque flavors, and in the extensive use of garlic as a flavoring. Also distinctive is the spicy Korean pickle known as Kimchi which can utilize almost any ingredient you fancy. This superb book provides no less than six different Kimchi recipes ranging from Kimchi Pancakes to Cucumber Kimchi. There are many other pickled dishes including the proverbial Pickled Peppers. Meats are spiced, soups are spiced, shellfish, noodles and dessert drinks are spiced as well.

The noodle dishes are diverse and tasty as are the rice dishes. There is a recipe for Spicy Sashimi Rice that is particularly appetizing. Amongst desserts there are Poached Asian Pear, Chilled Cinnamin-Ginger Tea, an absolutely beautiful Watermelon Punch and a Lemon-Ginger Martini known as a soju cocktail, which is made from a distilled liquor made from potatos or yams. The combinations of flavors amongst the 70 recipes in this book is amazingly eclectic. Each recipe averages between 8 and 10 ingredients so they truly are light recipes. Something else that is attractive to a busy cook is that they are very easy to prepare and do not take long, most of them taking about 10-20 minutes of preparation.

I cannot imagine an easier introduction to this fascinating cuisine. The array of flavors and textures contained in this relatively slim cookbook is broad enough to forestall culinary boredom, even with frequent use. The book also contains some beautiful photos of food and Korean cultural sites, providing sufficient atmosphere necessary to act as an enticement to the prospective Korean cook. This is a splendid cookbook that will not gather dust on you book shelf.

I don't eat Korean food, so I have no idea how the recipes in this book related to actual Korean food. I can say, however, that the recipes are all simple and to the point with short ingredient lists. This is a nicely bound and nicely formatted book, and overall a pleasure to read.

In the section on meats, the author discusses the fact that most people are introduced to Korean food through a Korean BBQ restaurant, and they are led to believe that the Korean diet is meat heavy. The recipes definitely stick to the perception of Korean food being a meat-heavy cuisine, despite the authors claim that meat is something for special occasions or to be used as a condiment.

One thing that springs immediately to mind when I think of Korea is kimchee. This has four different recipes for it, which is a good start for learning Kimchee I hope.

Overall I'm quite happy with this as my first foray into Korean food.

This book is a really easy way to make really good Korean food! The recipes here are so easy to make and taste as good as the Korean food I had in Korea. I was lucky enough to try these recipes out on a Korean student friend who lived with us for 2 years, and earned his thumbs up.

Living in Hawaii for a few years, I got hooked on Korean food. When I returned to smalltown Montana, I began to Jones for kalbi and bulgogi and kimchee and all those delightful little dishes that came with the main dish in restaurants. So I was really excited to get a copy of this book. It has easy to follow recipes for the classics I was looking for, very handy sections on necessary ingredients and equipment and where to get them, and some nice color photos and cultural notes. If you have never cooked Korean food before, and live in a remote part of the country away from Asian food supplies, and will only get one Korean cookbook, this is a good choice. I would have given it five stars but decided not to, because publishers need to realize that certain kinds of books, notably cookbooks, should be bound in spiral or other formats so that they lay flat while you prepare the food, instead of having to flip back pages that keep turning on their own while having goopy hands and thus messing up your book!