Description
Product Description
Winner of the 2011 James Beard Foundation Award for International Cooking, this is the authoritative guide to stir-frying: the cooking technique that makes less seem like more, extends small amounts of food to feed many, and makes ingredients their most tender and delicious.
The stir-fry is all things: refined, improvisational, adaptable, and inventive. The technique and tradition of stir-frying, which is at once simple yet subtly complex, is as vital today as it has been for hundreds of years—and is the key to quick and tasty meals.
In Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge, award-winning author Grace Young shares more than 100 classic stir-fry recipes that sizzle with heat and pop with flavor, from the great Cantonese stir-fry masters to the culinary customs of Sichuan, Hunan, Shanghai, Beijing, Fujian, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, as well as other countries around the world. With more than eighty stunning full-color photographs, Young’s definitive work illustrates the innumerable, easy-to-learn possibilities the technique offers—dry stir-fries, moist stir-fries, clear stir-fries, velvet stir-fries—and weaves the insights of Chinese cooking philosophy into the preparation of beloved dishes as Kung Pao Chicken, Stir-Fried Beef and Broccoli, Chicken Lo Mein with Ginger Mushrooms, and Dry-Fried Sichuan Beans.
From Publishers Weekly
Stir-frying may have been pedestrianized by generations of vegetarian college students, but this beautiful, comprehensive cookbook restores it to its rightful place among the most elegant cookery techniques. The virtues of stir-frying, Young writes, are many: it makes bounty out of small amounts of meat and oil; it emphasizes healthful vegetables; and most importantly, it creates 'alchemic flavor out of raw ingredients. Young (The Breath of a Wok), has a scholarly yet impassioned approach, and she fuses personal anecdotes, meticulously researched history, and stir-fry–related arcana to illuminate her subject. She covers types of woks and utensils and a recommended stir-fry pantry, including a photograph of sauces with tricky-to-decipher packaging. At the book's heart are the classic techniques and dishes of China's regional cuisines, such as Hunan-style cumin beef, Cantonese chicken with black bean sauce, and stir-fried Sichuan beans. Still, for Young, who always travels with her own wok, the story of stir-frying is also the story of the Chinese diaspora. By tracing the stir-fry around the world, she demonstrates all of the diversity it can contain: Jamaican stir-fried chicken with chayote, Cuban fried rice, and Peruvian stir-fried filet mignon. For the serious home cook, this informative, lyrical tome is an inspiration. Photos. (May)
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From Booklist
Most people associate stir-frying solely with Chinese cookery, but this classic method of flash cooking has influenced cuisines throughout the world due in large part to the Chinese diaspora. Young, whose expertise in wok technique has already enlightened American cooks, has now gathered recipes for stir-frying reflecting culinary traditions as far-flung as Indonesia and Peru. Familiar Chinese dishes such as Sichuan Pork with Peppers and Peanuts and Shrimp in Lobster Sauce honor classic flavor combinations, but Jamaican Chicken with Chayote shows that stir-frying can adapt to other cultural impulses. For the novice, Young offers lots of basic yet learned advice on shopping for unfamiliar ingredients and on assembling a Chinese pantry. Photographs and step-by-step instructions make fundamental wok tools and techniques accessible to even the least experienced. Her sidebars featuring talented stir-frying masters from all over the world add human dimension to the recipes. --Mark Knoblauch
Review
"With this extraordinarily inspiring and comprehensive book, Grace Young establishes herself not only as one of the world’s great expe
Features
- Simon Schuster