Ken Hom's Asian Ingredients: A Guide With Recipes

This book is an indispensable guide to the exotic and often baffling collection of vegetables and ingredients found in the Asian marketplace. In the introduction author Ken Hom points out that, despite the growing popularity of Oriental cuisine, many cooks still have a limited understanding of Asian ingredients. Cooks who purchase Hom's book will find it answers many of their basic questions.

The first thing that strikes you about the book is the number of photographs: one for each ingredient. Combined with its compact size, this makes the book an excellent reference to take along on your next visit to an Asian market. Of course, merely knowing that silk squash and Chinese okra are different names for the same ridged green gourd doesn't help you decide whether to store it in the refrigerator or at room temperature once you get home. In the written text accompanying the illustrations, Hom provides a wealth of details on storage and preparation. Interesting bits of trivia, such as the fact that bean curd is commonly called "meat without bones," are an added bonus.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section contains a discussion of cooking equipment and techniques that is de rigueur for every book on Chinese cooking these days. Lacking illustrations, this section is fairly brief, and cooks seeking detailed information on, say, skinning a duck, would do well to search elsewhere. By contrast, everyone from the novice to the expert will find something to tempt them in the book's final section containing nearly thirty recipes. Sesame noodles, Szechuan peppercorn beef and stir-fried shark's fin with eggs are just a few examples. Still, it is the combination of illustrations and information about everything from bok choy to peanut oil in the middle section that make the book an invaluable reference tool.