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Asian Vegetables: From Long Beans to Lemongrass, A Simple Guide to Asian Produce Plus 50 Delicious, Easy Recipes
Average Customer Rating:  
List Price:
$18.95
Asia Trips Trips Price:
$6.39
Your Savings: $ 12.56 ( 66% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Chronicle Books
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.65
EAN: 9780811827591
ISBN: 0811827593
Label: Chronicle Books
Manufacturer: Chronicle Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 132
Publication Date: 2001-06
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Studio: Chronicle Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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For anyone who has ever been dazzled but daunted at the Asian market, here is an indispensable, easy-to-use guide to identifying, choosing, and preparing these wonderfully unusual vegetables. From Amaranth and Bok Choy to Lotus Root and Lemongrass, food editor and writer Sara Deseran describes clearly the exotic array of Asian produce now widely available, explaining everything you need to know to shop confidently. This lavishly photographed resource is rounded out with 50 contemporary recipes, from Edamame with Szechwan Pepper-Salt to Stir-fried Shrimp and Garlic Chives. Asian Vegetables takes the mystery out of these enticing ingredients and puts the flavor in for fabulously healthy and delicious meals.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Yummy
Comment: We borrowed this book from the library at first. We tried many of the recipes and loved almost all of them and so ended up buying it. We have tried about 8 recipes so far and the only one we haven't enjoyed thoroughly was the long beans with dried shrimp (the dried shrimp was not to our taste-buds liking!).
This book just serves as an intro to the veggies used in asian cooking, giving a brief description for each one. It offers only one or two recipes per veggie. And don't be deceived, this is not a vegetarian book! Most of the recipes have meat! (The braised short ribs with hearts of bok choy was great!)
Very delicious!
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Average Book, not up to Standards on the Subject
Comment: `Asian Vegetables' by first time author, Sara Deseran is a lightweight entry into the world of books about Asian cooking. While there may not be as many heavyweight classics as there are in English for Italian, French, or Mediterranean cuisines, there are important classics against which one's efforts must be measured. The heavyweight in the area of guides to Asian ingredients is `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients', updated in 2000.
For starters, for roughly the same list price in paperback, Cost's classic has twice as many pages, covers all ingredients, not just vegetables, and presents vegetables and all other products in a greater depth than Ms. Deseran's book. For starters, Deseran does not include the Latin scientific names for her vegetables, which is doubly annoying as she herself says, most of the vegetables have different names, even in different parts of China, let alone different names in Japan and Thailand. So, the only way to be sure we are talking about the same thing is to give the one name that is guaranteed to be the same across all books.
Ms. Deseran has one opportunity to gain a march on Cost's book by providing color photographs of almost all of the plants she discusses, but this feature is, to my mind, done poorly. In an attempt to compare and contrast the appearance of related vegetables, the photographs are all `family pictures'. Thus, for example, one picture of four oriental members of the cabbage family is so small that I am very hard pressed to see the differences between the four vegetables in the photograph, and I am hard pressed to see the difference between choy sum (Chinese flowering cabbage) and the Mediterranean veggie, broccoli Rabe (rapini). This brings up another weakness with the book.
One of the main features of the book is the recipes presented for each featured ingredient. One problem with these recipes is that relatively few of these ingredients are available outside of an Oriental market in a large city such as New York or San Francisco. My local very well stocked megamart probably carries less than a third of the ingredients in this book. One of the virtues of Bruce Cost's book is that since it covers all types of Asian products, including meat, fish, noodles, sauces, and grains, the average coverage is probably better than half, as grains, noodles, and fish are much more common than many vegetables. So, even though Ms. Deseran says that most oriental leafy greens are almost entirely interchangeable with one another, this doesn't help if you can't find any. It would have made the recipes much more useful if the author had provided substitutions, especially for the leafy green vegetables and the squashes.
Even on the subjects on which both Deseran and Cost have articles, Cost's information is deeper and generally more useful. While Deseran has articles on `Ginger' and `Galangal and Turmeric', Cost has several pages on the `Ginger family', including individual articles on `Ginger', `Galangal', `Turmeric', `Mioga Ginger', and `Lesser Galangal'. For the ginger family, both books provide two soup recipes featuring ginger and Galangal. Deseran gives the usual short paragraph to ginger, while Cost gives two pages to ginger, including a discussion of `baby ginger' and ginger shoots. Cost also covers dried and powdered preparations made from ginger and turmeric, which are beyond the scope of Deseran's book. Deseran does cover a fairly sizable number of non-vegetable topics in her `pantry glossary', but most entries offer little substantial information. For example, there is a paragraph on chicken broth, which gives no recipe for same, and makes no mention, like Cost, that the Asian chicken broth is an entirely different preparation than it's French or Italian cousins. She simply suggests you use a commercial western style organic chicken broth. This point alone makes me question the depth to which Ms. Deseran has seriously researched her subject.
Oddly, Ms. Deseran's bibliography is very respectable and includes `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients'. It almost seems she knows of this important work, but has never read it. Ms. Deseran's patron and inspiration for this book is noted Chinese cookbook author, Barbara Tropp, whose `The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking' has all the cachet and quality of a Chinese `Mastering the Art of French Cooking' by Julia Child. And, Ms. Tropp agrees with Mr. Cost in clearly distinguishing Chinese from French broth by leaving out the vegetables and adding ginger. So much for packaged supermarket stocks!
One attraction found in Ms. Deseran's book is the anecdotes by noted chefs on Oriental ingredients. I found these contributed virtually nothing to the value of the book.
Virtually the only situation in which it seems Ms. Deseran's book may have an edge over Bruce Cost's work is if you happen to live near a first class Asian market which stocks a good variety of fresh ingredients and the color pictures can serve as an aid in identifying the products. But then, Cost's book becomes more valuable, as it offers an excellent guide to how to make the best of Asian markets, something Ms. Deseran does not cover, except to note how to care for the vegetables once you have them.
This is really an average book, so my three stars simply reflects that this book offers virtually nothing when compared to the standard works on the subject.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A poor man's "Amaranth to Zucchini"
Comment: This is a good guide to the produce you'll find in an Asian market, and it gives you a decent idea of what you can do with that bitter melon or mustard cabbage after you've brought it home. It's a good book -- but I can't work up my enthusiasm for it.
For one thing: even though the photography is attractive, it's not terribly useful. Presumably to both save money and to give a sense of size-and-scale, most of the vegetable photos have several items in the same picture (Chinese broccoli next to choy sum next to mustard cabbage), with little circles (TOO-little circles) indicating the item highlighted in the text. The veggie photos are also smaller than the recipe photos; personally, I'd rather a good hard look at a healthy bunch of greens than a full-page picture of Asian gumbo with mustard cabbage and chinese sausage (however appealing that recipe might be).
The information given is also... well, not quite minimal, but far from exhaustive. While the entry for Lotus root in Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini is two or three pages (plus recipes), there's really only 3 paragraphs devoted to it here. It's good information, mind you, just not that much of it.
But note that I do give the book 4 stars. If you're completely new to Asian cooking, then this inexpensive book may be helpful (and a fatter book would be overwhelming).
Customer Rating:
Summary: A little too limited in category
Comment: This book would've ordinarily been a very good book, however, with a few of the same kinds of books available at the same time, I believe that you should shop around before purchasing this one. I have looked at several with the same theme and have found that "Asian Greens" is more concise and lists 3x more vegetables than this book and offers 30 more recipes than this book. Yes the pictures are very beautiful but so are the ones in "Asian Greens". For an informative guide, I would have to go with "Asian Greens" -- unfortunately, I picked up this one first and have since bought "Asian Greens" to help me pick Asian vegetables at the markets.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Everything You Need to Know
Comment: Next time I go to my local farmer's market I will take this book with me to share with the other shoppers who stand puzzled in front of the Asian vegetable vendor's table. In addition to a complete guide to Asian vegetables with great pictures, this book is full of recipes that are clearly explained and good to eat. The author's style, something one doesn't always notice in a cookbook, is personal and fun to read.
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