Customer Reviews

Wine With Asian Food

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

 

 

I've been scouring for a good book on wine recommendations that would complement the wonderful but divergent flavours of Asian food. Fortunately I came across a Newsweek magazine article regarding this publication and from their notes, decided to buy a copy - with absolutely no regrets!

It's a very accessible guide, simply organised with a systemic approach for easy referencing so that finding the right wine to match any Asian meal is effortless.
Japanese, Indian, Singaporean, Malaysian, Thai, Laotian and Indonesian food have been included and grouped into 5 main flavours. Dry, sweet, sparkling and fortified wines have been categorized into 7 styles.

One simply needs to cross reference the wine style to the dominant flavour of the food. A large selection of Old World, New World and many wine alternatives are suggested.
An enormous bonus is the selection of 50 sumptous recipies complete with gorgeous photographs and numerous accompanying wine recommendations for each dish.

I would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone looking for the definitive guide!

I live in West Los Angeles and it has been hard trying to find authentic Singapore food around here. When my favorite restaurant "Kuala Lumpur" in Pasadena closed, I just gave up. I know there are some other restaurants, but with gas prices going up, I'm not willing to drive all over the place for an okay meal anymore. That is why I was so excited when I got this book. I know there are plenty of Singapore cookbooks out there. I have several which I purchased in Singapore...problem is, they are not written for an American audience. Ingredient names are incomprehensible here, and everything is in metric. So the lone book on Singapore cooking in my library has been "The Cooking of Singapore" by Chris Yeo, until now!

I am so excited about this book for several reasons. It has many of my favorite foods from Singapore, like pepper crab, fish head curry, gado gado, hokkien fried noodles, laksa lemak, satay, beef rendang, and sayor lodeh. The authors have also hand picked classic recipes from India, China, Thailand, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. These are dishes we are familiar with and love, like Japanese yakitori and tempura, Indian tandoori chicken, Chinese spareribs, Thai kayang grilled chicken, among others. The gorgeous photography really whets your appetite, and the few dishes I've tried so far have been quite good. The best part is the ingredients are easy to find, and the instructions are straightforward making cooking a pleasure. I'm not a wine connoisseur, and to be honest, had never even thought of wine with Asian food before I got this book. But they have made it so simple to pair with your dish...just glance on the right column next to the recipe, and you can have fun experimenting. The front section of the book delves much deeper into their selection process and helps you understand their approach. I find myself referencing the book before dining out sometimes, which helps me feel more confident when ordering wine.

Next time you get invited to an Asian dinner, consider bringing a bottle of wine that pairs well with the meal they are preparing, or bring this book as a hostess gift. It would also make a perfect, perhaps unexpected gift for your wine enthusiast friends as well.

Being both a food and wine fanatic I was excited to learn about this book froma short article in Wine spectator. Unfortunately, the excitement was short lived.

The book starts off well as it breaks wine down into seven categories based on their weight, their level of sweetness and their balancing of acidity. This is outstanding and very interesting!! The problem is that even though I live in a very large city and have access to large wine shops the majority of the varietals mentioned are impossible to find in fact many I'd never even heard of.

The book's quality dropped significantly after page 45 when it stopped discussing the qualities and flavors of various wines.

My first frustration came with the Table of Contents; instead of categorizing the cuisine by country it was categorized by the type of flavor. The categories were "Fesh & Herbal", "Savory & Rich", "Mildly Spicy & Light Smoky", "Spicy & Smoky" and "Fiery & Sweet". Although it's innovative it's virtually useless in terms of practicality.

The recipes themselves were uninspiring and I had a hard time finding a few to try because the photos were of such below average quality that they would turn me off the dish.

The photo of the Indonesia Satay shows a pile of burned satay on a bamboo plate. The burnt tips are the most prominant item in the photo and the bowl of peanut sauce is a shimmering pile of chunky substance that looks more like --- (well use your imagination) than peanut sauce. Their Old World recommended varietal for the dish was a good "Trebbiano d'Abruzzo" such as Gianni Masciarellii's Marina Cvetic. What on earth is that and I challenge anyone to go to their cellar and produce a bottle. They redeem themselves with their New World recommendation and instead of lisitng an obscure varietal/producer a much more useful recommendation of "lightly wooded wines from Chardonnay or Viognier".

The impression I received as that the authors were attempting to show off their knowledge of Old World wines by constantly listing the unusual while New World recommendations were more general.

To summarize; as a wine book they have done an excellent book, as a cook book it's poor and in terms of matching wine with food the jury is still out.