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

Customer Reviews

Very good recipes/techniques, but monitor salttiness...

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.

Not for the novice cook!

I think this cookbook has great potential in the hands of an experienced cook who can read the recipes and make necessary adjustments, but for the novice, following the recipes to the letter, results may be frustrating and disappointing. As an example, the Tea-Rubbed Salmon (using the Five Spice Chile Tea Rub) looks very enticing. The recipe for the rub calls for very large quantities of several spices, and yields six cups. The recipe states that the rub will keep for three weeks in the refrigerator. The salmon recipe calls for only one cup of this rub, and following the recipe exactly, I found that using this amount of rub completely overwhelmed the flavor of the salmon, rather than complementing it. The dish was barely edible. Just a sprinkle might have done the trick nicely! As it was, I was left with five cups of an incredibly intense spice rub, and there is no way on earth I'd want to use it six times in three weeks (before it expired)- this proved to be an enormous waste. I feel that the same lesson may be applied to other master recipes; they yield very large quantities of very intense flavor bases, and one might not want to use the same flavor base multiple times in the span of just a few weeks. I'd strongly recommend preparing a fraction (say, one-sixth) of a master recipe to make sure you -really- like it before investing in a full batch. I made up an eighth of a batch of the Thai Lime Dipping Sauce to use in the Thai Lime Chicken Salad, and this worked extremely well. The master recipe for the dipping sauce makes 5 cups, and the chicken salad recipe calls for only 1/2 cup... the dipping sauce keeps for only a week, so unless you'd like to eat this salad 10 times in a week, waste is inevitable. I don't think Ming scaled these recipes down enough to be useful for the home cook.

Fresh and Interesting Ideas if you have lots of time

I was so excited when I got this cookbook, but I had no idea what was in store for me....I think the average recipe takes about 3 hours to prepare. Many of the the recipes call for two master recipes which take an average of an hour. I tried to make the the Meat Broth master recipe...it took 2 days. Try to find 10 pounds of veal bones in one day....It took the store 3 days to save enough for me. The cooking techniques are not that difficult but most of the time will be gathering all the ingredients. I don't recommend this cookbook for anyone that does not live in a metropolitan area because you will not be able to find certain things and he doens't really suggest substitutions.