Dumplings are humble and homey. They make people smile. I have loved them since childhood, and this site focuses on cooking and finding the tastiest morsels. It's also the companion to my cookbook, Asian Dumplings.
One of the things that I love to do is teach cooking classes. They’re great opportunities for learning, making new friends, and meeting up with old friends. When Asian Tofu released, I thought I’d be teaching only tofu classes. Turns out that people are interested in Vietnamese food, Asian dumplings, and tofu.
The result is that I am often scheduling classes covering all of my works. It’s really cool, these mini Asian cooking extravaganzas! Depending on your location, you can attend one or all. I can’t afford to travel everywhere to teach so my apologies if I don’t end up in your neck of the woods.
Photo by Karen Shinto
Registration hasn’t opened for everything that I’ve booked. There are many, and I figure it’s easier to list them all at once for you to peruse. If you’re interested in attending something, mark your calendars and check back later. I try to post registration links when they’re available on the ADT classes and events page but sometimes I flub.
I haven’t had time to make a new dumpling to share with you, but I have been fielding email queries from cooks interested in preparing Asian dumplings. Over the weekend, this came from Meghan in Indiana:
I was wondering if it is possible to make dumplings, or pot stickers, without egg yolks? I am allergic to egg yolks...and pork actually. That's not a big deal though because I could always add beef or chicken, etc.. but I do need to know about the egg. I'm not allergic to egg whites and it does actually work in most recipes that I've tried. I would really appreciate it if you could let me know. Thanks!
After I wrote back to Meghan, I decided to organize and expand my tips to her in a post. For the details, visit Viet World Kitchen where the post resides. Thanks!
I first had the preparation in October 2009 in Sydney, Australia. I was there to speak at the Sydney International Food Festival (called "Crave"). Whenever I had the chance, I went out to eat as much amazing Asian food as I could. At the Sydney oupost of Din Tai Fung, I ordered a similar dish as this one to accompany a steamer tray of xiao long bao Shanghai soup dumplings.
It's taken me a few years but I found a way to replicate the flavors and experience in California. See the recipe on Viet World Kitchen.
Remarkably easy and versatile, Indonesian tahu telur (tahu means tofu and telur means eggs) is like egg foo yung with pieces of fried tofu. In its elemental state, a block tofu is subtle in flavor, a canvas for receiving other ingredients. However, if you fry tofu, it gets a little crunchy and nutty tasting, almost like crisp chicken skin.
For these pancakes, small flattish pieces of tofu get fried and then mixed with egg. Then the mixture is dropped into hot oil and fried as amoeba-like pancakes with crisp surfaces and edges. The delicately rich and eggy result gets crowned with crunchy vegetables and savory-sweet-spicy sauce, typically peanut sauce or chile-spiked sweet soy sauce; both sauces are in the photo above. The combination of texture and flavors is amazing.
You can do a lot with these pancakes, including presenting them as an accompaniment to Southeast Asian dumplings. My thoughts drift to the following recipes in Asian Dumplings:
Vegetarian crystal dumplings (chai kuih, p. 139)
Curry puffs (karipap, p. 125) and sticky rice
Spiced chicken in banana leaf (lemper ayam, p. 173)
I stopped using cheesecloth for cooking purposes about 2 years ago. It was expensive to purchase at markets and cookware shops. It got caught in my scissors at the most inconvenient times. It had to be discarded after each use. I got fed up and instead, turned to unbleached muslin. I have never looked back. It's great for making dumpling fillings and more.
Just posted 5 reasons for using muslin in the kitchen and tips on where and how to buy muslin on Viet World Kitchen.
It’s been kind of an amazing year full of fantastic developments in my food writing career. Along with the Asian Tofu book release, both of my earlier works were selected by Cooking Light for their Top 100 Cookbooks of the Last 25 Years awards. (The awards are in celebration of the magazine’s 25th anniversary.) Each month, the editors thematically reveal their picks.
The March issue has the fourth installment of the series, and the editors chose seven works for the Asian cookbook category. I was blown away to see the above photo with Asian Dumplings and Into the Vietnamese Kitchen in the stack along with Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Hot Sour Salty Sweet, Madhur Jaffrey’s At Home with Madhur Jaffrey, Hiroko Shimbo’s The Japanese Kitchen, and Eileen Yin Fei Lo’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking. Not only do I respect these authors (I have used their works for years) but I am also lucky to count most of them as friends. Wow.
Read more about the awards on Viet World Kitchen. Thanks for your dumpling interest!
My mother got me making dumplings and she also prompted me to rethink tofu, resulting in the Asian Tofu cookbook, which officially released today! In 2009, I started working on this book, thinking that I knew tofu. However, I quickly realized that I had lots to learn. Tofu’s history, meanings, and uses are vast and absolutely fascinating. I’ve tried to pack as much of all of that into the book, which is why Asian Tofu contains recipes and technical tips, as well as background information and people’s personal stories.
To give you a holistic perspective on the book, the Mighty Tofu Team at Ten Speed Press (creative director Betsy Stromberg and editor Melissa Moore) and I put together a short book trailer. We finished it last week and it’s ready for your prime time viewing:
This book differs from Into the Vietnamese Kitchen and Asian Dumplings in that it’s not about a single cuisine or is it totally technique driven. It’s a lens for experiencing Asian foodways. We have studio photos as well as travel shots that I took and others contributed.
Responses, Availability & Events
The initial reaction to and interest in Asian Tofu has been amazingly great. Along with the feature in Martha StewartLiving magazine and positive reviews by San Francisco and others, Amazon selected Asian Tofu as one of its top cookbooks of February 2012. Sunset magazine supported the topic by inviting me to curate and develop a collection of tofu recipes for their March issue.
So it's taking a good 2 1/2 years to birth the Asian Tofu cookbook! Check it out in the form of a hardcover, regular ebook (same content as the hardcover but in a digital format), or enhanced ebook (with instructional videos and travelogues). [BTW, from today till March 2, Bon Appetit magazine is running an Asian Tofu cookbook giveaway (click for details).]
The format you choose depends on your interest, lifestyle, and reading device (i.e., Nook, Kindle, or iPad and their varied versions). If you haven’t already, view a sample instructional video and download a recipe sampler from the “Asian Tofu Sneak Peek.”
If you’re interested in classes, demos, and book talks, I have a number scheduled for March, April, and May, mostly in the Bay Area and New York City. Check the events listing for details.
There are a number of dumpling fillings that rely on tofu -- Korean and vegetarian ones in particular. If you're into exploring the world of tofu (for dumplings or not), check out my new book, Asian Tofu, to be released on Tuesday, February 28.
Preview copies have been going out to media folks. I've been waiting for the green light to show you the insides of the book. Last Thursday, Ten Speed Press and Random House posted sample content for public perusal at their Recipe Club website. For your convenience, I'm reposting the information here.
First up is one of the videos from the Asian Tofu enhanced ebook. The clip offers tips for understanding different kinds of tofu textures, which can be tricky to figure out at the store. I cover the main types used in the book:
Along with these kinds of instructional videos, we also embedded travelogue videos in the enhanced edition. Those are among the great add-ons that you can include in digital publications.
Whether you're into a hardcover or digital cookbook, it boils down to the recipes at the end of the day. For a sense of the nearly 100 recipes, check out some pages from the book's interior. The viewing screen below is handy for a quick scan. To cook the recipe sampler -- a Japanese soup, Chinese stir-fry, Japanese salad, and Indian crepe -- click on the cloud-like icon with an arrow at the bottom of the screen to download the pages as a pdf document.
I hope you like what we're publishing. If you do, please help me spread the word. Thanks much.
For more details on Asian Tofu (book reviews, description, and Mighty Team Tofu of collaborators and contributors) see this page on Viet World Kitchen.
