Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking Author: Fuchsia Dunlop | Language: English | ISBN:
B00E6L8LOG | Format: PDF
Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking Description
“A must-have for anyone who wants to cook Chinese food at home, home cooks and professionals alike.”—David Chang, Momofuku
Fuchsia Dunlop trained as a chef in China’s leading Sichuan cooking school and possesses the rare ability to write recipes for authentic Chinese food that you can make at home. Following her two seminal volumes on Sichuan and Hunan cooking, Every Grain of Rice is inspired by the vibrant everyday cooking of southern China, in which vegetables play the starring role, with small portions of meat and fish.
Try your hand at stir-fried potato slivers with chili pepper, vegetarian “Gong Bao Chicken,” sour-and-hot mushroom soup, or, if you’re ever in need of a quick fix, Fuchsia’s emergency late-night noodles. Many of the recipes require few ingredients and are ridiculously easy to make. Fuchsia also includes a comprehensive introduction to the key seasonings and techniques of the Chinese kitchen. With stunning photography and clear instructions, this is an essential cookbook for everyone, beginner and connoisseur alike, eager to introduce Chinese dishes into their daily cooking repertoire.
- File Size: 7950 KB
- Print Length: 352 pages
- Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (August 15, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00E6L8LOG
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,293 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #3
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > Asian > Chinese - #9
in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Kitchen Appliances > Rice Cookers - #14
in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Asian Cooking > Chinese
- #3
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Regional & International > Asian > Chinese - #9
in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Kitchen Appliances > Rice Cookers - #14
in Books > Cookbooks, Food & Wine > Asian Cooking > Chinese
I am a long-time Dunlop fan (my "Land of Plenty" is falling apart at this point). Given how much I adore her Sichuan and Hunan cookbooks, I really, really wanted to love this book -- I literally ordered it within five minutes of knowing about its existence! Having explored this book for the last couple of weeks, however, I am very sad to admit that I feel quite "meh" about it.
Most obviously (and as other reviewers have already pointed out), many recipes are repetitions or variants of those contained in her previous books. While this might make the book more complete as a stand-alone cookbook, it gets quite tedious for those of us with complete Dunlop collections.
This book has some minor annoyances, including weight measurements for small amounts of peanuts, ginger, etc. -- I find the teaspoon/tablespoon/ballpark approach from her previous books far more practical. Also, some directions are quite strange: wilting spinach before stir-frying seemed like an interesting idea, but yielded no practical difference (in my opinion).
More disturbingly, I have found that many of the dishes in this book just don't taste that good and/or are very uninteresting. Out of the dishes I've cooked from this book so far, I'd say that about 40% were "meh" (required additional soy sauce/vinegar/sesame oil/chicken powder to be palatable -- probably wouldn't cook them again), 40% were "alright" (will cook them once in a while), and only 20% were "great" (loved it -- will add to my list of frequently repeated favorites). In contrast, I would put the breakdown for Dunlop's other cookbooks at about 5% "meh", 25% "alright" and 70% "great".
I'm a pretty big fan of Fuchsias, having discovered her cookbooks when going through some nasty chinese food withdrawals in Texas after a move from NYC. Having been a chef, and not finding the Chinese food I craved, I set out to create, myself, what I needed. Ms Dunlop's books were by far above and beyond the other books I tried. Unlike most people, I preferred her second book Revolutionary chinese cookbook (Hunan recipes) over Land of Plenty (Sichuan), and when her first new book in seven years was coming out I pre-ordered it asap. It arrived two weeks before its release date (!) and I opened it up to...a recipe I already knew??
General Tso's chicken, on page 122, I didn't need. First of all it's already on page 120 of Revolutionary, and I know it by heart, having cooked it about eight times a year for years. The next recipe I see is Pock-Marked Old Woman's Tofu...Hmm, I know that one too. It's on page 313 of Land of Plenty. Then I read the introduction and she's retelling a story that's in her memoir Shark's fin and Sichuan pepper! Damn, her third cookbook is a greatest hits?
Not quiet. I was shocked at first, but the Pock-Marked tofu was a new vegetarian version, the book is a lot thicker than the last two (and I needed to dig more, I guess), and her General Tso's chicken is so good, it's ok to publish it twice. She noted in the end of her memoir she was thinking of going vegetarian, and a lot of these recipes are light on meat, or none at all. But the main emphases in this book are on lighter, healthier, more cost effective Chinese recipes, not on her own personal diet.
I've already cooked a few recipes, and have read a bunch more, I'm impressed. A lot of work has gone into this book.
Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking Preview
Link
Please Wait...