Simply Ming: Easy Techniques for East-Meets-West Meals

I have the Blue Ginger book and although I've used it,those recipes are much more complicated and hard for the home cook to replicate, so when I saw Simply Ming I was a little apprehensive...was I surprised! This book not only has proven to be great as far as the recipes included but I've used many of the master recipes in my own dishes. I agree with others that the master recipes yield large quantities (especially if you're cooking for 1 or 2 people) but they are easy to cut in half. I've found that if I make the master recipe ahead then the recipes using them are quiet fast. I have used reduced sodium soy sauce to lessen the "saltiness" and have been mindful of the amount of hot pepper ingredients as you can always add more of these. I've recommended this book to friends and family who like to cook but don't have the time or skills to complete complicated recipes and they agree...IT'S GREAT

I have started working through this book. So far the results have been very good to excellent. This is a fun book to work with. With only two or three recipes using a "master recipe", I am having a lot of fun inventing things to use the master recipe. This book is a great way to generate some creativity in your cooking. I expect that when I am done, I will have worked over half the recipes in this book which is very good given the competition in my cooking library. There are potentially a few downsides to this book, both related to Ming's restaurant experience. If you aren't cooking for a lot of people, the master recipe does make a lot. I have found I can successfully halve it to a reasonable amount for my needs over the time it lasts. I also find that the amount of food in a recipe matches that in a restaurant, so I figure that there will be lots of leftovers (great for lunches) if I don't reduce it a bit. Saltiness can be a problem some for some, but with a little experience it can be adjusted. I don't consider any of this grounds to reduce the rating, but the cook should be aware.

I've just made the fabulous fried calamari with the thai-lime dipping sauce, absolutely the best we've ever had! Only problem was the dipping sauce on its own is too salty to use alone as a dipping sauce, but when used to marinate the calamari it imparted wonderful flavor. The next time I make the calamari, I would make the spice mixture but not mix it with salt as the dipping sauce had more than enough saltiness. I also made the curry oil, which was very light and flavorful, great for light stir fries. Chocolate ganache and creme anglaise recipes were very good as well, especially the warm chocolate cake recipe. Overall a very nice book and a good companion to the PBS tv shows.

Ming Tsai has given us a cookbook with a rare and rewarding twist to presenting an exciting, tasty `East West' cuisine. The skill and inspiration behind the book is unmistakable. The more difficult issue is to what extent the method by which the recipes are presented make sense for your style of cooking.Ming begins each chapter with 32 `master recipes' followed by one or more uses for that master recipe. In this context, `master recipe' does not meat the same as the way the term is used by Julia Child in, for example `The Way to Cook'. In this case, the outcome of a master recipe is a complete dish on which one can make variations. In Ming Tsai's usage, a `master recipe' is the recipe for an ingredient which is not a dish in itself. This is certainly not a new idea as the examples of classic stocks and pastry doughs point out. Ming's contribution is to apply this principle systematically to a wide range of intermediate, storable ingredients for creating about 145 different dishes.Ming states the notion came to him when he translated procedures used in his restaurant, `Blue Ginger' to the practice of home cooking. I am convinced that professional cooking techniques can often be transferred to the home with good results, but as many have pointed out, there are many techniques which simply don't travel, and, that the home cook can often achieve better results than one can do in a typical restaurant. The question is whether or not this technique succeed at home. Obviously, many home cooks make their own stocks and pastry doughs, so the question is basically whether the technique works equally well for the other `master ingredients' presented in this book. I think the answer largely depends on what kind of cooking one does.The types of cooks which will clearly benefit from this book are:1. People who enjoy reading cookbooks, regardless of the practicality of the recipes.2. `foodies'. People for whom cooking is a hobby.3. People with large familys who have the time and resources to prepare and store the ingredients.4. People with finicky family members, where some effort on two dishes can be combined.5. Other people with a lot of time for advance preparation and semi-skilled hands for prep work. A church social kitchen, for example.6. People working up menus for restaurants.7. People who do serious entertaining, for whom the food / drink pairings will enhance their menus.This is unquestionably a good and useful book. I am especially grateful for the authoritative recipe for dashi broth and for the bread / pastry sections of the book. There are some tips which I have never seen before and which are unquestionably useful to the home cook. The recipes are also not too expensive. For example, being largely based on Oriental cuisines, the recipes use canola or grapeseed oil in place of olive oil. There is also very little use of the other famous Italian, French, or Russian big ticket ingredients. On the other hand, some ingredients may be very hard to find