Reddit reviews Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking
We found 15 Reddit comments about Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Every Grain of Rice
Chinese food! I pretty much completely adopted traditional Chinese home cooking after reading Fuschia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice and it's helped so much. Chinese cuisine is particularly adaptable to the low fodmap diet.
These "rules" vary from culture to culture. Often you can pick up a cookbook that's focused on a specific culture's food and find that it includes a section about how to organize meals, plus sample meals made up of recipes from the cookbook. For example, this Chinese cookbook features a section of "menu ideas" with 8 menus for 2 people, 7 for 4 people, and 5 for 6 people, plus it has a section called "planning a Chinese meal" which explains how Chinese meals are served, how they are eaten, and so on. This Middle Eastern book has something similar, etc.
Ok, so I'm a student at USC and I've just started cooking chinese food this summer. For a recipe book, you want anything by Fuchsia Dunlop. She's got three books out: Land of Plenty (四川菜), Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook (湖南菜), and Every Grain of Rice (a compilation of the other two). Hands down the best authentic Chinese cookbooks that are written by a westerner, while remaining true to the original recipes.
Finding a good Chinese market has actually been my biggest problem, which is a little ridiculous because it's Los Angeles and I know all the old 阿姨s have to shop somewhere. I'm not sure what the situation is over in Westwood, but the only chinese grocery store that I've found that really has everything is the Ai Hoa market, just a block away from the Chinatown metro station (Cluttered and unorganized, just like the markets over in China! But they really do have everything). I've also heard good things about A Grocery Warehouse. But I haven't really explored K-town or Little tokyo, so there may be some good grocers there. Please share if you find some, and report back if you find some Korean/Japanese grocers that also sell Chinese food!
For Chinese cuisine, especially Sichuan & Hunanese, Fuchsia Dunlop's cookbooks are amazing. I'd be hard-pressed to pick a favorite but would lean toward Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking.
I used recipes from Every Grain of Rice by Fuschia Dunlop for the pork, eggplant and tofu. I highly recommend the youtube channel Chinese Cooking Demystified though, they've covered red-braised pork and fish-fragrant eggplant.
Aight girl-
Foreign Cuisine-
How to Eataly - Oscar Farinetti - We made the most AMAZING brisket meatballs and a super simple yet completely delicious red sauce out of this book
Around My French Table - Dorie Greenspan - Where the Cornish hens and gougeres came from.
Real Korean Cooking - Maangchi - Korean Fried Chicken. We've made them twice now because they're so good and can't wait to do more.
Mexican Everyday - Rick Bayless - Learned how to make perfect guac from this book and so far we've made these v tasty chorizo/mushroom/potato tacos. The recipe is SO cheap and SO voluminous that we had it as a taco filling, a quesadilla filling, and we're making a hash with it for brunch this morning.
Every Grain of Rice - Fuchsia Dunlop - We haven't tried anything out of here yet but there are sooooo many good-looking recipes in here.
Entice with Spice - Shubhra Ramineni - Likewise, haven't made anything out of here yet but looking forward to trying it all out soon.
Jack's Wife Freda - Dean & Maya Jankelowitz - This is actually a book from a restaurant that my fiance and I LOVED when we last visited NYC. It's got a lot of fusion recipes. Mediterranean/Israeli/South African/etc. Really unique flavors and also v comfort-food based. We're making rosewater waffles out of this book tomorrow!
Baking-
Rose's Baking Basics - Rose Levy Barenbaum - This book is incredible. She has tons and tons of step-by-step photos which is SUPER helpful. We made the dark chocolate caramel tart out of this book, but pretty much everything in here looks amazing.
Modern Baking - Donna Hay - I mean... There is some INSANELY decadent looking stuff in here. We haven't tried any of these recipes yet but I can't wait to!
Misc-
Cook Like a Pro - Ina Garten - It was really hard to pick just one Ina book but I liked most of the recipes in this one. She has this ridic recipe for a dijon mustard chicken that is INCREDIBLE. Also, this bitch knows how to cook some veggies. Big fan of this one.
The Food Lab - /u/j_kenji_lopez-alt - I just love this guy, tbh. We've made a really fantastic beef tenderloin out of this book and an incredible red wine sauce to go with it and of course, his famous roasted potatoes which are now my holy grail recipe for roasted potatoes. This book is like a science textbook only instead of boring stuff it's FOOD science, which is my favorite kind.
Those were all the ones we purchased ourselves (though technically Eataly was a gift BUT we love it and plan to use it often.) We have other cookbooks in our stable that we've received as gifts, which is what resulted in my fiance and I deciding we wanted to embark on this journey. We kept being given cookbooks and never doing anything with them. But man, do people love it when you send them pics of stuff you cooked out of a book they gave you. If people give you cookbooks, use them!! It will make their day to see it's being used. Here's what else is on our cookbook shelf-
The Forest Feast Gatherings - Erin Gleeson - This is a vegetarian book my fiance's mom gave us a few years ago for Christmas. We have a bunch of veggie friends (and friends with a lot of different allergies) so we turn to this book to have a few things that are edible by all of them when we have them over, as we often do. This book has a really delicious salad that has pomegranate seeds, pear, and hazelnut that is out of this world good. I also got my HG salad dressing from this book.
The Salad Bowl - Nicola Graimes - Another gift from my fiance's mom. Is she trying to tell us something?? Honestly haven't looked much into this book yet but it sure is pretty.
The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook - Dinah Bucholz - This was a gift from the assistant in my office. Everyone in my office knows me as the Harry Potter girl because I have a lightning bolt tattoo, haha. We haven't made anything out of this yet, but we probably will have some sort of epic feast with recipes from this book when GoT starts back up later this year.
Talk About Good - Louisiana Lafayette Junior League - My boss gave this to my fiance and I as part of an engagement gift. My fiance went to school in New Orleans. It's primarily New Orleansian/Cajun food. Haven't made anything out of it yet, but we are looking forward to it.
And that's what's on our cookbook shelf for now.
edit also omg thanks for the gold!! <3
I'm a bit of a cookbook junkie, so I have a bunch to recommend. I'm interpreting this as "good cookbooks from cuisines in Asia" so there are some that are native and others that are from specific restaurants in the US, but I would consider these legit both in terms of the food and the recipes/techniques. Here are a few of my favorites:
Pan-Asian
Burmese
Cambodian
Chinese
Indian
Indonesia
Japanese
Korean
Malaysian
Middle Eastern
Philippine
Russian
Sri Lankan
Taiwanese
Thailand
Turkish
Vietnamese
(edit: screwed up a couple links)
Try Woks of Life, maybe.
They have an ingredients glossary which should help you work out what's in all the mysterious jars and what unfamiliar vegetables are.
I also highly recommend Fuchsia Dunlop's book Every Grain of Rice. I'm British and picked it up out of curiosity knowing next-to-nothing about traditional Chinese cooking, and that book has pretty much become my bible. It's great at explaining unfamiliar ingredients and tools, gives advice on how to treat everything, and of course the recipes are great. My girlfriend's parents are from Hong Kong, and were very impressed with the food I cooked for them from it. Major brownie points there. :)
I love Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice for Szechuan cooking. Every dish I've made from it has been a winner.
Almost everything in those photos comes from Fuchsia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice, which is a pretty awesome collection of authentic Chinese dishes that are reasonably simple to cook at home. I added descriptions to most of the images in the gallery here.
Not personally, though I've been toying with the idea of cooking through Fuchsia Dunlop's "Every Grain of Rice", which is a nice collection of Chinese recipes.
I've browsed some blogs of people who attempted other books, mainly momofukufor2.com for Dave Chang's "Momofuku" and The Big Fat Undertaking, which goes through Heston Blumenthal's "The Fat Duck Cookbook" (a pretty ridiculous undertaking but interesting read)
https://www.amazon.com/Every-Grain-Rice-Chinese-Cooking/dp/0393089045/ref=sr_1_1
This book changed me and my wife's life. You'll need an Asian grocery store, and you'll have to get some common ingredients but it's made most grocery trips super simple, and most of the meals take about 15-20 minutes.
My white girlfriend cooks from this book. The meals taste like what I grew up eating in China.
Both from Fuschia Dunlop's Every Grain of Rice.
I'm not the biggest fan of diet foods/fads, I lost a whole bunch of weight just watching out portion sizes and cooking more. I like to follow Michael Pollan's nutritional plan which is, in order of importance, eat food, not too much, mostly plants.
Fuchsia Dunlop's books are quite good as well.
Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking
Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province
Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking