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Book ReviewsChinese Cooking Made Easy: With Simple Sauces and Dressings (Wei-chuan�s cookbook) |
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Book: Chinese Cooking Made Easy: With Simple Sauces and Dressings (Wei-chuan�s cookbook)
Written by: Mu-Tsun Lee Wei-Chuan Publishing |
Publisher: Wei-Chuan Pub.
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5
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A good starting point
Rating:
5 / 5
The key to this cookbook is correct expectations. As mentioned, you won't find a recipe in here for General Tso Chicken, etc. What you will get is a basic introduction to how to make authentic tasting dishes by seeing how various sauces are made, etc. This provided a great starting point for me to be able to improvise all kinds of dishes, soups, etc.
If you are looking for a cookbook that will walk you step by step through Moo Goo Gai Pan and Moo Shu Pork, you probably want to look elsewhere.
Somewhat disappointing.
Rating:
3 / 5
I was hoping to replicate many of the dishes I buy at my local chinese restaruant: Kung Pao Chicken, chow mein, chow fun dishes, and a variety of veggie and lamb dishes. This particular book though is full of heavier meat recipes; roast chicken, stewed duck, peking duck, smoked duck, various preparations of chicken legs and breasts, pork chops, and beef steaks. There ARE a few dishes like I was looking for: chicken w/ black beans, curry beef, ground meat in lettuce, spicy shrimp w/ cashews, but they are fewer than I'd hoped. The soup selection has only 3 choices and does not include Hot & Sour soup. "Fried Noodles" are the only noodle recipe. There are no Chow Fun recipes. There are almost no vegetable dish recipes except for detailed info on boiling or stir frying specific veggies (which is good info, but it's not a dish, it's just prep).
More minor problems are: they don't use english abbreviations for quantities even in the English text. They use "T." for tablespoon instead of "tbsp". Many recipes reference "wine", but so far I have not found what kind of "wine" they actually mean listed in the intro How-To section.
Overall I find it lacking in terms of common "chinese lunch special" type dishes, or Szechuan dishes (as best I can tell from reading anyhow). Some of these dishes may be in here, but they're called "spicy" this or that instead of the names you'd see them listed on a menu as. This may or may not be more accurate, but I'd rather have commonly understood names instead of technically accurate names.
I'm caucasian. I'm also Californian and near San Francisco so I've been eating chinese food all my life and love it, but I'm far from literate in what differentiates Szechuan from Mandarin, etc. Therefore I find this book a little less informative than I'd hoped. I would probably not buy it again for the relatively few recipes in it I will ever cook, but the section on squid dishes and a couple others is enough to keep me from trying to return it.
Simple, delicious Chinese recipes
Rating:
5 / 5
This is an excellent cookbook for those who are not familiar with cooking Chinese dishes. What I like most about this book is that the majority of recipes don't call for ingredients that are hard to find. Since I don't live anywhere near an Asian food store, this is a big plus for me. In addition, I'm a vegetarian and my husband is a big meat eater. This book has several vegetarian recipes in the back, so it satisfies both of our palates. To date, I have 18 Wei-Chuan cookbooks and I put this one in the top 5.
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