Why one home cook loves The Wok: Recipes and Techniques

I’ve made a few dishes from this book so far and most things turned out great. I enjoyed reading the sidebars during my free time and it’s almost like learning about the science behind the techniques I’ve hear of for a long time. The author did not just taught me “how”, but also “why”, which helped me understand how to use the ingredients for a better result and I was able to incorporate the techniques into my own recipes and improve them. I’m very impressed with this book and I have many more recipes to try from it. I have 5-10 Chinese cookbooks and this book has become my top 3 favorite cookbooks. What I especially love about this book is the simplicity of the ingredients and detailed instructions of the wok cooking techniques. I made the red braised pork ( chairman mao’s pork) and it’s the best I’ve ever made. The ingredients were basic (sugar, oil,, soy sauce, star anise, cinnamon and time) and ingredients were easy to find. I can’t believe I used to try so many fancy ingredients in the same dish, made a mess(I used to cook the hard sugar in oil before dumping the pork in but his recipe was to cook sugar in water to make the syrup, the result were the same but I didn’t have to suffer from the pain of oil spattered on my face) and the dish was the best red braised pork I’ve ever made. Also, the paper of this book is thin but of high quality to accommodate the 700 pages of the print. I love the pictures not taking up the entire page or two pages for one fancy picture just to add pages to the book (a lot of authors do that these days), the pictures in this book are mostly basic and clear enough for me to see what’s going on without having to turn the page to read the recipe which I really like. Critic: I’ve noticed a couple of errors/ things that were not very clear in the book but it’s not a deal breaker. For example, the fish fragrant eggplant dish, (it’s a great recipe and genius way to prepare eggplant), the author mentioned that ground pork is optional, but he didn’t mention when to put the meat in if it was included, which is fine because I figured it out with my experience. However, it seems like the recipe was developed without including the ground pork because when I used the ground pork, it soaked up all the sauce and made the whole dish dry and eggplant flavorless. The pork became salty and soaked up all the flavor and tastes great. So I wouldn’t recommend using ground pork for this recipe unless you make bigger quantities of sauce. The egg tomato dish turned into a watery mess and looked gross (I always cooked the eggs and tomatoes separately and they are delicious), but it could be my fault too. Maybe I poured more of the cornstarch slurry into the eggs than I should have before I poured the egg mixture into the tomato part, maybe I can try it again sometime. All in all I highly recommend this book and really appreciate all the work Kenji put in it.