Asian Cooking with Ease
Modern Asian Kitchen: Essential and Easy Recipes for Ramen, Dumplings, Dim Sum, Stir-Fries, Rice Bowls, Pho, Bibimbaps, and More
Do your bookshelves feature desired but subsequently unloved cookbooks trumpeting quick takes on cuisines that feel foreign to your everyday cooking? Or do your pantry shelves boast a host of “international” ingredients optimistically bought, never used?
If so, Modern Asian Kitchen may hit your sweet spot.
That may not seem to be the case in the early pages, where author Kat Lieu opens with a potentially discouraging list of must-have tools and equipment that includes an air fryer, clay pot, instant pot, rice cooker, stand mixer, steamers, and a wok. That’s a lot for a book whose cover promises essential and easy recipes, and the equipment called for is sometimes overkill; a stand mixer is hardly a must for whipping four egg whites, for example. That list is followed by another long one of pantry needs requiring international/Asian grocers, such as furu, salted egg yolk, curry leaf, ube, pork floss, sago, and calamansi.
But after that somewhat daunting opening, many of the recipes prove to be both full of flavor and straightforward, sometimes suggesting equipment alternatives, such as a Dutch oven for a clay pot. And many label less-common ingredients as optional and offer suggestions to make meat and seafood dishes suitable for vegetarians or vegans.
Take the shrimp dumplings recipe: It lists sesame seeds, tobiko (roe), MSG, ginger, and bamboo shoots all as optional. If readers make an initial grocery run upon buying the book for the basics of Shaoxing wine, sesame oil, soy sauce, and oyster sauce—needed for many of the recipes—the only ingredient they might not have on hand would be rice paper (and adventuresome cooks can try making them by scratch from a recipe Lieu includes).
That holds true as well for the pork and shrimp “100 Dreams of Toronto” wontons. Chinese broccoli or water chestnuts, Chinese yellow chives, and flounder or hondashi powder are all listed as optional filling ingredients; a trip to an Asian grocer might be needed mainly for the thin wrappers. Tested with water chestnuts, hondashi powder, and a substitute of minced scallions for the chives, these were rich and worth the time—and in fact relatively quick to mix and shape, considering how many future meals they provide for, since they freeze well. The recipe test skipped the 1½ teaspoons of sugar (why do dumplings need sugar?!) and substituted a dab of “Not Just Bouillon” paste for bouillon powder—highly recommended. (Looking for something to serve with the wontons? Lieu suggests dipping sauce or chili crisp oil recipes; try also using this tomato salad with the boiled wontons, or pan-fry them per the recipe.)
Many recipes live up to the “easy” label, such as mottled tea eggs, a quickly made success redolent of their overnight marinade of star anise, bay leaves, and cinnamon. Using soft-boiled eggs versus the traditional hard-boiled, these proved simple, rich, and creamy on their own and as a salad addition, and an intriguing counterpoint on a charcuterie plate.
Sweet and soy salmon provided a last-minute supper, with soy sauce, honey, lemon juice, and sake bathing the fish for 30 minutes while the oven preheats. Generally, the recipes don’t lie when they say an ingredient is optional (no need to run to the store for the teaspoon of furu here), but cooks should include as many as possible, such as the optional sesame oil in the salmon marinade, for more layered flavors.
Lieu does not shy away from including pinches of MSG in many recipes, and she does not generally designate it as optional; including it enhanced the salmon and the wontons.
Salmon reappears in a spin on the sushi bake that went viral during Covid lockdowns. A bed of rice gets topped with a saucy mixture of salmon and imitation crab coated in soy, Japanese mayonnaise, oyster sauce, lemon juice, sesame oil, and the cook’s choice of sriracha, gochujang, or sweet chili sauce (and, again, honey or agave syrup—but added sweetness is unnecessary), then broiled to a slight char. Without adding prep time or hard-to-find ingredients, this combination created more interest in each bite than the usual recipe, especially when topped with all she suggests, including furikake, eel sauce, and avocado.
For a quick pantry supper with a comforting, creamy, and fiber-packed sauce, udon sauced with an interesting mix of canned pumpkin, miso, cardamom, and cinnamon worked well, especially topped with nuts and mint or basil for textural variety. The recipe could have been more precise; instead of simply saying to mix the sauce with the udon, it calls for adding “generous dollops” and gives instructions for “if” there is leftover sauce, without clarifying why there would be. But the thick, chewy noodles will be good either way—whether you take a minimalist approach or believe in a little pasta with your sauce.
Somewhat more time-consuming, but still simple, is chicken smoked in a foil-lined wok (tested in a stovetop smoker). While tasty, this recipe felt like less than the sum of its parts, with somewhat muted flavors despite a soy sauce-based marinade and a smoke blend of barley tea, sugar, rice, star anise, dried orange peel, applewood chips, Sichuan peppercorns, and cocoa powder. (The recipe calls for skin-on, boneless chicken thighs, which is hard to come by unless you bone thighs yourself, but it worked fine with skinless chicken.)
Lieu, who is half Chinese and half Vietnamese, and married to a Filipino man, notes that she has only ever cooked in her Asian American kitchen, so she does not try to claim recipe authenticity beyond that. She includes recipes based in Korean, Japanese, Indian, and other Asian cuisines, often with a short back story about the cooks who shared the recipe with her.
Lieu started a Facebook group in 2020, Subtle Asian Baking, that quickly took off; this is her second book, following Modern Asian Baking at Home in 2023. Sometimes, the recipes read a bit too much like a blog, rather than a cookbook. It’s fine in a blog to say you haven’t tried a variation on a recipe, but annoying in a cookbook to bring it up and say you can’t be bothered—such as when Lieu says she’s been told her recipe for Hong Kong Clay Pot Rice can be made in a Dutch oven instead of a clay pot, but “I just haven’t tried yet.” Why not? Given that more people likely own a Dutch oven, respect the readers who paid for the book by giving it a test run.
The book closes with a few not-too-sweet treats, including a tres leches cake. This sponge cake, tinted pale green from pandan extract* and spiked with a dab of miso, gets soaked in a mixture of more miso and pandan, the trio of whole, evaporated, and sweetened condensed milk, and a dash of coconut extract. Frosted with whipped cream, topped with the baker’s choice of raspberries, coconut flakes, sea salt and/or edible gold flakes, and drizzled with thinned coconut jam, this very moist cake managed the sweet feat of being both rich and light. It keeps the sweetness under control, though the confectioners’ sugar could be omitted from the whipped cream, given the coconut jam.
*The recipe test included a homemade extract, to avoid the artificial flavoring of most commercial versions. The quick homemade extract (blend frozen pandan leaves with water, strain, and let stand overnight), offers light flavor but no green tinge, absent the food coloring of most bottled versions. There are a few naturally flavored commercial extracts, but these also tend to be clear.
Quick takes:
Modern Asian Kitchen: Essential and Easy Recipes for Ramen, Dumplings, Dim Sum, Stir-Fries, Rice Bowls, Pho, Bibimbaps, and More, by Kat Lieu. 208 pages. Published by Harvard Common Press, 2024.
Organization: Chapters on fundamentals such as rice and miso soup, vegetables, dim sum and street food, one-pan dishes, rice dishes, noodle recipes, sauces, and bread and desserts.
Ingredients measurement methods: All over the map—some ingredients in grams, others in ounces; vegetable weights sometimes called for, sometimes not; liquid ingredients never listed in grams, but in tablespoons and milliliters.
Photos: Photo illustrates each recipe.
Index: Frustratingly inconsistent, the index is middling at best. Examples of poor indexing include a recipe for shrimp toast that calls for milk bread (but does not refer to the bread recipe), and the index does not have an entry for the bread at all (not under bread, milk, or the actual recipe name); no listing for eggs or recipe names means the only way to find the “Chinatown Jammy Tea Eggs” is under “tea.”
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