Customer Reviews

Thai and South-East Asian Cookbook, the Ultimate: All the traditions, ingredients and techniques, with over 300 spicy and aromatic recipes illustrated step-by-step

5 star:		(4)
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3 star:		(2)
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I've had this cookbook now for about 6 months and have made at least 25 recipes from the book. Each has been a huge success! The book has a detailed section on ingredients and the recipes are well illustrated. After cooking with this book I no longer have the need to visit Thai restaurants to obtain that authentic Thai flavor!

Beautiful well organized cookbook. Almost like an encyclopedia of information. Lots of pictures. Excellent recipes. Arrived in just a few days.

I made a recipe with tofu in it from this book, and fed it to my boyfriend, who said he hated tofu, but would try it since I was making it. He's requested I serve it again! If I'm not careful, all we'll be eating is Thai/Asian food. I've yet to try anything from the book that wasn't delicious. The background information on the ingredients is great. As someone who tends to play it fast and loose with cooking (I don't have recipes for a lot of the things I make) I've also found that you can get a pretty good idea about what combinations of ingredients work well together, along with proportions, from using this book. It also has a lot of information about substitutes for some of the more exotic ingredients. Altogether, this book, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, and Fat, are probably the only cookbooks I'll ever want. No wait--I have one about chocolate too!

If you were going to have one asian cookbook in your library this would be the one! Beautifully illistrated and so well written. I have done a lot of asian cooking and have several books. This book is the ultimate!!! As one of the reviews stated the print is small but readable and I do wear glasses. I was a little disappointed when my book arrived because the book was on the small side, my fault!! Did not read the measurements. My friend has this book and her book was much larger, but the smaller version has the samethings in it as the larger one. Can hardly wait to try the recipes......ENJOY!!!

I wonder why my previous review was not included on this page. The book is beautifully illustrated, and I'm sure the recipes are delicious. But the print is so small that even with glasses (and I don't have cataracts!), it was so difficult to read that I returned the book.

I am a cook with a strong horticultural background, with a masters degree in Horticulture and many years of growing all sorts of vegetables in home gardens, so I have a special interest in the ingredients used in cooking worldwide. I was a bit disappointed that this relatively new book, which has a large section on ingredients, seemed to skimp on or simply be wrong about a number of important components.
Take the entry on "Snake Beans/Green Beans" for example. In the West, these are mostly sold as "Yard-long Beans". The book says they are available in "two varieties", a pale green and a dark green; yet any casual search of online seed sources (such as Baker Creek or Kitazawa) will quickly turn up numerous "varieties" that are mottled lavendar/pink, bright red and dark purple, some of which keep some of their color on cooking, and with seeds from white to red to brown or black, adapted to grow from temperate Japan to tropical southern Thailand and beyond, under dry or extremely humid conditions. Clearly there are far more than "two varieties", and flavor is dependent on more than color or thickness of the pod (which can also vary depending on growing conditions).
I was also somewhat disappointed by the lack of botanical designations for the plant ingredients. "Taro" and "Yam" for example are common names that can refer to a number of widely dissimilar species of plants, even different genera, and names found in grocery stores can add to the confusion - a fact not mentioned in a section on ingredient selection...