Best vietnamese cooking, food & wine books according to redditors
We found 10 Reddit comments discussing the best vietnamese cooking, food & wine books. We ranked the 6 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
![Vietnamese Home Cooking: [A Cookbook]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51b9Rru7AYL.jpg)
Christine actually won the whole competition. Her cookbook, Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food was published two days ago.
Asia's a big, ancient place. Even within each nation there are unique styles of regional and ethnic fare.
With that in mind, I'd love to see some recommendations here for awesome Indian, Filipino, Hmong, Uzbek, etc. cookbooks.
Japanese
Lets get beyond sushi and hibatchi.
Shizuo Tsuji's Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art is a great starting point. If you want to get technical you should check out Ando's Washoku or Hachisu's Preserving the Japanese Way.
If you want to start simple, Hachisu also has a great book on Japanese Farm Food. Ono and Salat have written a great noodle slurping opus in Japanese Soul Cooking.
Chinese
What we've come to think of as Chinese food in the US is a natural part of human appropriation of food styles, but with all due respect to Trader Vic's, crab rangoon and other buffet staples really aren't the real deal. Food in China is extremely regional. You don't have to go very deep to see the vast differentiation in spicy Schezwan recipes and Cantonese Dim Sum culture.
For your reading pleasure:
Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking Eileen Yin-Fei Lo.
Breath of the Wok by Grace Young and Alan Richardson.
Phoenix Claws and Jade Trees by Kian Lam Kho and Jody Horton.
All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China by Carolyn Phillips.
Some people might freak out that I'm placing Erway's The Food of Taiwan under the Chinese category, but I'm not going to get into a political debate here. Taiwan has had a lot of different culinary influences due to migration / occupation and that is really the take away here.
Go forth, make bao.
Korean
Korea is having it's moment right now and if you want the classics, Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall's Growing up in a Korean Kitchen is a good baseline. It has all the greatest hits.
You also can't cook Korean food without kimchi. The only book I've read is Lauryn Chun's The Kimchi Cookbook which is kind of underwhelming considering the hundreds of styles of Kimchi that have been documented. The process of making kimchi (kimjang) even has a UNESCO world heritage designation. With that in mind, I think it's only a matter of time before we see a English book on the subject that has depth.
Given the cuisine's popularity, there are several other cookbooks on Korean food that have recently been published within the last year or so, I just haven't gotten around to reading them yet, so I won't recommend them here.
Thai
David Thompson's Thai Food and Thai Street Food are both excellent. /u/Empath1999 's recommendation of Andy Ricker's Pok Pok is excellent but it focuses on Northern Thai cuisine, so if you want to venture into central and southern Thai fare, Thompson's the other farang of note.
Vietnamese
Nguyen's Into the Vietnamese Kitchen provides a nice survey to Vietnamese cooking. Charles Phan also has a couple of cookbooks that are quite good but I'm sure that there are zealots out there who would bemoan authenticity in either Vietnamese Home Cooking or The Slanted Door, but seriously, who gives a shit, the dude has Beard Awards under his belt for fuck's sake.
TL;DR OP means well but its long past time to bury "Asian" as a catch-all for such a large and diverse part of a continent, no?
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)
Thanks for all the upvotes fellas! Recipe is from this book http://www.amazon.com/The-Foods-Vietnam-Routhier/dp/1556709595
Recipe is as follows: http://imgur.com/0btnUGY.jpg but replaced with chicken in lieu of beef and toasted sesame seeds in lieu of peanuts. My mom cooks northern style which typically isn't as sweet so she nixed the sugar and modifies the spice amounts to taste as she cooks.
You should check out Vietnamese Street Food by Tracy Lister and Andreas Phol. Here is a review by one of my favorite food bloggers.
http://stickyrice.typepad.com/my_weblog/2012/03/vietnamese-street-food-book-review.html
The blog review hits the nail on the head so hard. Seriously, the first time I opened the book I flashed back to wandering the streets of Ha Noi. I literally smell and taste the city whenever i open those pages.
I cannot state how much i love this recipe book. It is simple to follow, uses easy to acquire ingredients, and the recipes are authentic. You ought to be able to find everything (or close enough approximations) at a well stocked grocery store..
http://www.amazon.ca/Vietnamese-Street-Food-Tracey-Lister/dp/1742701426
Get this book. My copy is tattered and worn from overuse. I have over 20 cookbooks at home but this is the one I always go back to.
I had to find out if she won, so I went to her wiki. Apparently she wrote a cookbook that just came out. Amazon
I just came across this new one at Costco - beautiful photography and stories -- recipes seem legit:
My Vietnam: Stories and Recipes by Luke Nguyen
Let me recommend an excellent Vietnamese cookbook.
This book takes you on a culinary journey and teaches you how to make your own.
This is a decent video on broth making for pho, a bit long perhaps, makes for a good watch though; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxM4t8vP-0A
What I do is pretty similar. There are the traditional ways of making it of course with the beef bones..but I've found I enjoy a mix of veal and pork bones more. Sometimes I use duck bones, just depends if I want something different taste wise.
There are a decent amount of recipes out there for broth, the one I played with at first was this; http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Vietnamese-Pho-Rice-Noodle-Soup-with-Beef-232434 and then a few from books like http://www.amazon.com/Vietnamese-Home-Cooking-Charles-Phan/dp/1607740532/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414444571&sr=1-1&keywords=pho.
The key for me at least is I make my own spices, fish sauce, and trying to get down a recipe for Vietnamese style soy sauce. I keep to similar spices just homegrown instead..or from a CSA I belong too. Idea for me is freshness, home made dried star anise is going to be fresher than the store bought. It sounds like a lot of effort but it's not just for the Pho recipe, it's for everything else I use the spices for too. The only thing I have yet to grow is poppy (for obvious reasons) and saffron.
So that's basically my secret, follow the normal recipes but with pork and veal bones along with home made spices. If you can afford it, spring water for the broth I find to be good. I personally have hard water at home so I have to soften it which makes it salty..messes with everything I cook. Thus I use spring water. As to how much greatness that adds I don't really know..just better than using soften salty water.
Edit* - forgot, so in the youtube video, how they roast the veggies I do mine on a charcoal grill. A lot of my spices that need to be roasted I roast in a pan over charcoal.