Product Description

John Mariani has called Ming Tsai "the foremost interpreter of East-West cuisine in America today," and the appreciative diners at Blue Ginger, Ming's celebrated restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and fans of his top-rated Food Network show, East Meets West with Ming Tsai, agree. Now, in his first cookbook, Ming shares the technique and philosophy behind his exciting cross-cultural fare.
        
The key, Ming explains, is retaining a healthy respect for the traditions of each cuisine so that diverse elements can be combined in a harmonious way. His trademark Foie Gras and Morel Shu Mai, for example, elevates a traditional yet simple Asian preparation with a luxuriously sophisticated Western ingredient and transforms a humble dish into truly elegant fare. Prosciutto and Asian Pear Maki is a playful reinterpretation of a Japanese favorite, while Classic Roast Chicken with Sticky Rice Stuffing gives the holiday staple a savory new spin. The result is food that's inventive yet not trendy, complex in flavor but surprisingly easy to prepare.
        
In chapters devoted to Soups; Dim Sum (irresistible starters and bite-sized party fare); Rice and Noodles; Seafood; Birds; Meat; Sides; Oils, Dips and Seasonings; and Desserts, Ming proves again and again how delicious the coming together of East and West can be: Gingered Beef with Leeks and Asparagus, Hoisin-Marinated Chicken with Napa Slaw, Asian Gazpacho with Cilantro-Jicama Cream, and Wok-Flashed Salt and Pepper Shrimp are all quick and straightforward preparations that provide big flavors in every bite. And when it's time to pull out all the stops, a chapter dedicated to Over-the-Top recipes will guide home cooks through an array of showstopping dishes that dazzle with innovative techniques and presentations. Beverage suggestions accompany each recipe to complete the dining experience.
        
Filled with Ming's tips for working with unfamiliar ingredients and preparations, Blue Ginger is an outstanding introduction to the pleasures of East-West cooking.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #245211 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-09
• Released on: 1999-11-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
Thanks to his cooking program on the Television Food Network, Ming Tsai has gone from chef to culinary celebrity, taking recipes from his Massachusetts restaurant, Blue Ginger, and using them to introduce cooking with Asian ingredients in a most appealing way. Beyond being attractive, serene, and engagingly articulate, Ming Tsai makes cooking with Asian ingredients look easy. This book, a companion to his television shows, offers the same approach and low-key instructions that viewers have come to love. To fill in the visual details for those who have not viewed the cooking series, the book includes step-by-step black-and-white photos for filling potsticker dumplings, rolling sushi, and preparing sushi rice, as well as glorious color shots of many of the completed dishes.

Tsai's specialty is bringing ingredients and techniques of Asia and the West together. It's not surprising to find Tsai using Asian banana leaves, French foie gras, and Southwestern chipotle chile peppers all at once. In fact, it's only natural for the Ohio-raised son of Chinese immigrants, who trained at the classically oriented Cordon Bleu in Paris and has cooked at U.S. restaurants from San Francisco to Santa Fe. His ability to create easily reproduced, globally influenced dishes is exceptional, and results in delights such as Smoky Turkey Shao Mai (dumplings filled with a chipotle-heated filling) and Asian Gazpacho spiked with ginger and Thai basil. Keeping it simple, Tsai offers a quick roll-up of Prosciutto and Asian Pear Maki. Lemon Basmati Rice, flavored with lemon zest and ginger, or couscous blended with a sauté of onion, scallion, and currants--both are side dishes made in minutes that can dress up a store-bought chicken, grilled meat, or Tsai's salmon teriyaki, creatively flavored with orange juice.

Blue Ginger offers many ways to spice up family meals and dishes to surprise guests without too much effort. Cooking from this book is an opportunity to take Asian ingredients you may have eaten in restaurants and master using them in your own kitchen. --Dana Jacobi

From Publishers Weekly
"Successful East-West cooking finds a harmonious way to combine distinct culinary approaches," proclaims Tsai, Emmy Award-winning chef-host of Food Network's East Meets West cooking program and owner of Blue Ginger restaurant in Wellesley, Mass. Tsai and Boehm (Empire Kosher Chicken Cookbook) distinguish their cross-cultural fare with popular fusion cooking. After a brief introduction summarizing Tsai's beginnings in his parents' Chinese-American restaurant in Dayton, Ohio, he turns to the eclectic contents of his pantry. Chapters divide the 125-plus recipes into soups, dim sum, rice and noodles, poultry, meat, seafood, elaborate side dishes and desserts, with mail-order sources. Flavor combinationsAfrom Rock Shrimp Lollipops with Spicy Almond Sauce to Lemongrass Parfait with Pineapple SalsaAdefy tradition. Many recipes require a long list of ingredients (e.g., Crispy Scallops with Carrot-Star Anise Syrup, Pomegranate-Marinated Squab with Thai Quince Chutney), but instructions are clearly written and often include tips for wine and food pairings and advice on ingredient substitutions and techniques. Tsai brings vigor and enthusiasm, along with inspired, intense flavor creations, to his cookbook, which will appeal to fans of his show and all readers with diverse palates. 9-city author tour. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Blue Ginger is Tsai's restaurant in Wellesley, MA, where he serves innovative crosscultural dishes like Onion Soup with Steamed Coriander Scallops and Mongolian Beef Sandwiches with Black Bean Aioli. Tsai, who is Chinese American (his parents had a restaurant in Dayton, OH), has an interesting culinary background that includes the Cordon Bleu; a stint at Fauchon, the famed Paris food emporium; study with a sushi master in Japan; and an earlier Southeast Asian restaurant in Palo Alto. His recipes are imaginative but not contrived, and he has an engaging style, as fans of his Food Network television series already know. Recommended for most collections.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Fabulous!
I love this cookbook! My favorites include pan fried chive and shrimp buns and braised curried lamb shanks. However, as a previous reviewer mentioned, there are some editing problems. For instance, the bun dough called for up to five cups of water when only 1 cup or less is needed! This produced a watery paste-had to remake the dough. With that said, I highly recommend this book.

Ming Tsai is great but watch out for the editor!
My husband and I love Ming Tsai's style of cooking. We were printing recipes off the Food TV site before this cookbook came out. So you can imagine our disappointment when we tried a few recipes out of this cookbook and found them riddled with typos, errors in ingredient amounts, and poor editing. The writer of the cookbook, Boehm (?), seems to have done slapdash work in the testing department: the translation of a restaurant-level preparation to that of the home cook is poor. We have had to do a great deal of juggling and rewrites to make the recipes come out right.

Ming, please hire a new collaborator for your next cookbook! Your recipes are too good to be messed up by poor editing!

A Ming fan
This cookbook contains all the recipes Ming Tsai created for his restaurant, Blue Ginger, and delivered on his show from his early episodes on the Food Network.

Pros:
- Take the time to make these recipes and one will not be disappointed.
- Rather then traveling to Ming's high-end restaurant, save $$$ and eat the same dishes at home.
- This is one of the very few cookbooks that produces fantastic results with every attempt.

Recipes I've tried and would make again:
- Smoky Turkey Shu Mai in Sweet Pea Broth
- Traditional Mandarin Fried Rice (already lost count how many times I've made this)
- Grilled Ponzu-Marinated Snapper with Ginger Pea Sprout Salad (4x and counting...)
- Turkey Breast with Three-Pea Fried Rice (3x)
- Asian-Marinated Pork Loin with Gingered Sweet Potatoes and Five-Spice Apples (too many to count!)
- Gingered Beef with Leeks and Asparagus (lost count on this one too!)
- Five-Peppercorn Grilled Rib-Eye Steaks
- Rice Paper-Wrapped Halibut with Foie Gras Mousse and Gingered Spaghetti Squash
- Glutinous Rice with Coconut and Mango
- Savory Braised Oxtail with Preserved Lemon Polenta (Oxtail was very good, but don't like polenta. Tried the polenta anyway, and, of course, didn't like it. -Just personal taste.)

Cons:
- All of these recipes are available on the Food Network site (with a little digging). While printing them from the website is at no cost (compared to the purchase price of this book), the book offers organization and color photos within bound material which fits much better on the bookshelf then the wad of papers one will end up with after printing all the recipes from the net.
- Novice cooks will find these dishes challenging if one has missed the presentations he provides on his show.
- A lot of the dishes are quite time consuming as many have 3 and 4 separate recipes to make one entire meal.

Overall:
As with anything, you reap what you sow. These recipes are unique, scrumptious and well worth the effort! I had the opportunity to meet Ming and he was gracious enough to sign this cookbook as well as pose for photos. Just like on the show, Ming came off as the same professional, down-to-Earth guy anyone would want to know.

Amazon.com ratings scale: 5 stars = Outstanding