Blue Ginger: East Meets West Cooking with Ming Tsai (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Thanks to his cooking program on the Television Food Network, Ming Tsai has gone from chef to culinary celebrity, taking recipes from his Massachusetts restaurant, Blue Ginger, and using them to introduce cooking with Asian ingredients in a most appealing way. Beyond being attractive, serene, and engagingly articulate, Ming Tsai makes cooking with Asian ingredients look easy. This book, a companion to his television shows, offers the same approach and low-key instructions that viewers have come to love. To fill in the visual details for those who have not viewed the cooking series, the book includes step-by-step black-and-white photos for filling potsticker dumplings, rolling sushi, and preparing sushi rice, as well as glorious color shots of many of the completed dishes.

Tsai's specialty is bringing ingredients and techniques of Asia and the West together. It's not surprising to find Tsai using Asian banana leaves, French foie gras, and Southwestern chipotle chile peppers all at once. In fact, it's only natural for the Ohio-raised son of Chinese immigrants, who trained at the classically oriented Cordon Bleu in Paris and has cooked at U.S. restaurants from San Francisco to Santa Fe. His ability to create easily reproduced, globally influenced dishes is exceptional, and results in delights such as Smoky Turkey Shao Mai (dumplings filled with a chipotle-heated filling) and Asian Gazpacho spiked with ginger and Thai basil. Keeping it simple, Tsai offers a quick roll-up of Prosciutto and Asian Pear Maki. Lemon Basmati Rice, flavored with lemon zest and ginger, or couscous blended with a sauté of onion, scallion, and currants--both are side dishes made in minutes that can dress up a store-bought chicken, grilled meat, or Tsai's salmon teriyaki, creatively flavored with orange juice.

Blue Ginger offers many ways to spice up family meals and dishes to surprise guests without too much effort. Cooking from this book is an opportunity to take Asian ingredients you may have eaten in restaurants and master using them in your own kitchen. --Dana Jacobi

From Publishers Weekly

"Successful East-West cooking finds a harmonious way to combine distinct culinary approaches," proclaims Tsai, Emmy Award-winning chef-host of Food Network's East Meets West cooking program and owner of Blue Ginger restaurant in Wellesley, Mass. Tsai and Boehm (Empire Kosher Chicken Cookbook) distinguish their cross-cultural fare with popular fusion cooking. After a brief introduction summarizing Tsai's beginnings in his parents' Chinese-American restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, he turns to the eclectic contents of his pantry. Chapters divide the 125-plus recipes into soups, dim sum, rice and noodles, poultry, meat, seafood, elaborate side dishes and desserts, with mail-order sources. Flavor combinationsAfrom Rock Shrimp Lollipops with Spicy Almond Sauce to Lemongrass Parfait with Pineapple SalsaAdefy tradition. Many recipes require a long list of ingredients (e.g., Crispy Scallops with Carrot-Star Anise Syrup, Pomegranate-Marinated Squab with Thai Quince Chutney), but instructions are clearly written and often include tips for wine and food pairings and advice on ingredient substitutions and techniques. Tsai brings vigor and enthusiasm, along with inspired, intense flavor creations, to his cookbook, which will appeal to fans of his show and all readers with diverse palates. 9-city author tour. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1 edition (November 9, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609605305
• ISBN-13: 978-0609605301
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #252,645 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Ming Tsai is great but watch out for the editor!, October 28, 2002

By	Cynthia S. Froning "astrocyn" (Longmont, CO United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My husband and I love Ming Tsai's style of cooking. We were printing recipes off the Food TV site before this cookbook came out. So you can imagine our disappointment when we tried a few recipes out of this cookbook and found them riddled with typos, errors in ingredient amounts, and poor editing. The writer of the cookbook, Boehm (?), seems to have done slapdash work in the testing department: the translation of a restaurant-level preparation to that of the home cook is poor. We have had to do a great deal of juggling and rewrites to make the recipes come out right.

Ming, please hire a new collaborator for your next cookbook! Your recipes are too good to be messed up by poor editing!

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delicious and Doable, December 4, 1999

By A Customer

Even though I'm a fairly good cook, I've really not had too much luck with making my own Chinese and other Asian dishes, that is, until I got the Blue Ginger Cookbook. The dishes I've made so far have been outstanding and fairly easy. The only way you'd have a problem with any of these dishes is if you don't have access to a good asian market like I do. But since there are many mail order and online venues to obtain these ingredients, it should be no problem.

Ming provides a wonderful glossary that explains in detail, many of the ingredients and what to substitute for them if you can't find what you're looking for. Another great thing about this book is that the dishes are not limited to Chinese, but include many other Asian dishes (with a certain Western influence i.e.East Meets West).

I recommend this book to other cooks like me who love Chinese and other Asian cuisine, but, also like me, have never been able to figure out the dishes on your own.

Bon Appetit!

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fun and adventurous, June 29, 2001

By	Mrs. Hilton (Minot, North Dakota) - See all my reviews

I purchased this cookbook last year. I am a huge fan of preparing asian cuisines and many european as well, enjoying the creative outlet it provides me, so this book appealed to my exploritive cooking nature.

It is, I have found, easy to follow and very unique in its combinations. I have had only one bad turn out on a recipe, which I will blame on too much "help" from my dinner guests.

Word to the wise, this is not some mainstay anchor for your basic cookbook collection. this book was meant for people who, like me, enjoy cooking for the creation, because this book is exactly what it purports to be, east meets west cuisine.

some of the over the top recipes this book has that I have loved are: the Thai hot and sour soap /w shrimp toast, smoked salmon and jicama maki sushi, the ahi tuna parfait with two caviars, savory braised oxtail, and crispy scallops with carrot-star anise syrup. the desserts are fantastic too.

to some of the naysayers, yes some of the ingredients are not something that you may use regularly, but if you cook, you can find uses for the leftovers. and I live in the middle of north dakota, if I can find the called for ingredients, anyone can.

I hope that this book brings as much joy to your cooking as it has to mine.