I like to try recipes from cookbooks, unaltered.  This seems to be something that foodies decry as being a silly exercise in mindlessness, because all cooking should be improvisational.  I call bullshit.  I’m happy to improvise and come up with a meal from various cuisines, but if I’m cooking something I’ve never made before, I’m not just going to look at a recipe once and wing it.  I want to understand the intention, what the published dish is supposed to taste like.  In my mind, I’ll compare it with other things I’ve had.  Maybe I’ve had the dish in a restaurant, or I’ve enjoyed other meals in the same ethnic family.  Once I’ve tried it, I can move forward with a little more understanding.

For trained chefs, this is what cooking school seems to be all about.  You learn techniques and flavor profiles from a few different regions of the world and then they are challenged to regularly innovate on those ideas.  If you’ve ever read about someone going through cooking school, read any , or watch any episode of Top Chef, you’ll see that chefs are expected to cook from experience, not books.  However, ask them to produce a dish in a cuisine they haven’t mastered and they’ll usually turn up short.

For me, I still feel like I’m learning a lot about Asian food.  The ingredients and techniques are in some ways very different from those used in Western cuisine.  Since I haven’t taken the opportunity to attend any local cooking classes, like those taught by Tien as part of an adult education program, I take my chances learning a lot from books.  Without further ado, let’s get into the book at hand.

Whether you’ve made pho from scratch, or never heard of chap chae, Jaden Hair’s cookbook has something to offer.  Since I have had some experience cooking variations of many of the dishes in the book, some of the recipes worried me a little bit.

How good could “Quick Vietnamese Chicken Pho” be?  Pho (pronounced “fuh”) is supposed to use a richly flavored broth that requires long simmering, not some Rachel Ray 30-minute abomination.  My fears were unfounded, though.  The technique worked really well, infusing classic pho flavors like star anise and clove into chicken stock.  I think the real secret to success here is starting with a good chicken stock.  Trust me, making your own stock is easy and uses up stuff you’d probably just throw away otherwise.  You’re not too stupid to cook.  Apologies for no photos… it was really good and we ate it too fast to stop and take photos.

I’m sure nearly everyone in America has eaten egg rolls in their lives, but how many people think of making them?  Well, we did, using “[Jaden Hair's] Mom’s Famous Crispy Eggrolls” recipe.  I shared a video of my daughter rolling them, but here are some more pictures of the before-and-after, as well as our younger daughter enjoying them with “dip” (a/k/a hoisin sauce).  The proportions of this recipe are huge.  We made about 40 egg rolls, perhaps being a little bit conservative with the filling.  We went on to make a couple dozen pot stickers and a batch of fried rice with the left over filling.

Jaden includes a really great recipe for a peanut sauce that serves as the base for another dish, “Thai-style Chicken Flatbread”.  This one I took her inspiration and ran with it.  After all, it’s really just another pizza topping suggestion.  I made my own dough, since I had the time.  We served it with some brussels sprouts cooked with bacon (not from the book).  This one was pretty popular with everyone in the family.

One dish I wasn’t crazy about was “Clams Sautéed in Garlic and Black Bean Sauce”.  I was lucky enough to go to the store right after a shipment of clams came in.  They were beautiful clams, too.  Unfortunately, the sauce was  a bit spicier than we wanted, and the flavor just didn’t do it for us.  We ate it… all… and enjoyed it, but it’s not on our must-repeat list.  No finished-dish photo, but aren’t the clams lovely?

Chap Chae (or Jap Chae, Japchae) is a dish of sweet potato starch noodles with some vegetables and (usually) beef, flavored with sesame oil and soy sauce.  If you’re used to Italian pasta made from wheat, these noodles are weird.  They start out bumpy and greyish, then when you cook them they turn nearly clear, smooth, and the texture is springy and chewy.  They have very little flavor on their own, but they absorb flavor well.  This dish is one that I order in restaurants often, because I really love it.  The Steamy Kitchen recipe came through again, with a dish that we all loved.

Last, but not least (in this post), I’ll mention a couple of the vegetarian dishes in the book.  We made a big pot of jasmine rice and invited a couple of friends over one night and had the “Garlicky Tofu and Spinach” and the “Asian Style Brussels Sprouts”.  The tofu and spinach were cooked quickly until they were silky and smooth, with a delicious sauce rich with garlic and sesame oil.  Did I ever mention sesame oil is one of my favorite Asian ingredients?  Great stuff.  Anyway, the hardest part of the meal was the brussels sprouts, and only because I took the time to trim and slice them all by hand.  They are cooked quickly with some Vietnamese touches, like fish sauce and lime juice, just to start softening them.  They are bright and still a bit crunchy, offering a contrast to the soft tofu and spinach.  Best part about this meal?  I started when I put the rice in the rice cooker, and had all the food ready just as it was finished.

The theme of this book seems to be fast, flavorful food.  Jaden’s a mom, she does all the writing and photography for her blog and the cookbook herself, she’s obviously putting lessons from her own life on these pages.  The book is filled with so many beautiful photographs of her food, her travel, and her kids.  The great thing is that these recipes work.  It’s not just fast for the sake of being fast.  That said, the speed of Asian cooking usually relies on the cook’s diligence at the cutting board, prepping all the ingredients before-hand.  Take it as an opportunity to practice your knife skills, or an opportunity to buy pre-cut vegetables.

I’ll be doing another post soon with a recipe from the book.  It’s a versatile Korean recipe that you can bend to your will.  Stay tuned!

On a blog note, I’ve adjusted the line spacing (not everywhere yet, gotta track down a working Firebug), as it was mentioned in the survey that the text was a little dense and hard to read at times.  Let me know if you think it’s better, worse, or didn’t notice!

Some of the recipes seem to be more science experiment than recipe, relying on chemicals or equipment that one would expect to see in a lab, not a kitchen. Some, however, really rely on very traditional ingredients and techniques. No matter what the components are made of or what machine is required to prepare them, the dishes presented in this book are original and innovative in their pairing of flavors, textures, and visual elements.

The first recipe I’ve made from the book is YUBA, shrimp, orange, miso. This may seem like an odd title for a recipe, but it tells the reader (or diner) the main focus of the dish and the major contributing players. I’ve also seen this dish (presumably the same preparation) labeled as YUBA, shrimp, miso, togarashi.

Now, I know some of you out there may not know what yuba or miso, or togarashi are. I’ll start with the easiest, togarashi. It’s pretty much just Japanese chili powder. Miso is a fermented product made (usually) with rice and/or soybeans. It comes in many varieties, but white (shiro) and red (aka) miso are the most common. I almost always keep some miso in the house, as we love many Japanese dishes that use it. Yuba is made from the skin that forms when you heat soy milk. It’s apparently available dried or fresh, but this recipe leads you through making some yourself.

Like many recipes in the Alinea book, you make various components and then assemble them at the end. Some dishes may have dozens of components, some have very few. This one was pretty straight-forward, only 4 major components.

Following the precedent by the (much more famous than I) Carol Blymire (Alinea at Home) and Martin Lindsay (Alineaphile), I won’t share exact measurements for any component. In fact, since I was a bad blogger, I didn’t take photos of the whole process. Unfortunately neither Carol nor Martin, known for their diligent photo-documentation of these recipes, have done this one yet. Go buy the book… even just to look at it. Worst case, go look at it at the library (like I did).

First you make yuba. Simple enough, since it’s been made in China and Japan for hundreds of years, right? Well, it is pretty easy. This recipe calls for you to make soy milk (soak soybeans, blend with water, boil, strain) first. Then you simply heat it, wait 12-15 minutes until a skin forms, and take it off. This is somewhat easier said than done, since this stuff is slippery when fresh. The traditional way is to use chopsticks to gently lift it out, so that’s what I did. Lay it out, roll it up (if it wasn’t already all smushed together), and dehydrate it.

Orange in this recipe comes from candied zest. Peel off the zest, cut into strips “as thin as possible”, and blanch in some simple syrup. This component was pretty easy.

The miso goes into the sauce–a mayonnaise. If you’ve never made mayo before… go do it now. It’s one of the culinary wonders of the world. An egg yolk offers up its lecithin to emulsify oil and citrus juice, producing a creamy, tangy, clingy sauce perfect for just about anything fried (and sandwiches, and spoons). This mayo is flavored mainly with miso and lime juice. The recipe made way more than I needed for the (more than called for) yuba I made, so I’m looking to find something to pour this on soon. The only bad thing about homemade mayo is that it’s quite perishable.

The shrimp are supposed to be cut in a manner that I can only assume is easy on very large shrimp, producing an even strip of shrimp meat that gets wrapped around the yuba. Mine were not pretty, as I used what I had–frozen shrimp. I think they were a little too small.

Fry the yuba sticks, wrap them with shrimp, bake to cook the shrimp, sprinkle with salt and togarashi, and dress with the orange strips and some small chives.
Compare mine with pictures taken by Alinea diners on Google Image Search. I think I did pretty well. I definitely impressed my wife and our 6-year-old daughter. They both really liked how it looked and tasted. Our chives were not very potent, so their flavor didn’t come across very much, but all the other components played together so nicely. The soft shrimp contrasted with the crunchy yuba and the sweet orange complemented the flavors in the miso mayo.

You could probably “cheat” on this recipe with store-bought breadsticks or pretzel rods. Get some cocktail shrimp, cut them in half, lengthwise, and drape them around the breadsticks. Mix some miso and lime juice (and a little sugar and cayenne) into some store-bought mayo. Not sure how to cheat on the orange zest and togarashi… maybe just mix some into the mayo?

The point is that the flavors work so well together. The hardest part of this recipe is the time commitment. Soak the soybeans overnight. Cook up the milk. Each sheet of yuba takes 12-15 minutes. I made a dozen. Then you dry them for 3 hours. We’re already talking around 24 hours for one (albeit major) component of the dish. It was fun, but if I did it again, I’d buy soy milk, get bigger shrimp, and make more and bigger yuba sticks. They were good.