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‘Ching’s Everday Easy Chinese’ by Ching-He Huang

COOKBOOK REVIEW

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 25, 2012|By T. Susan Chang

Americans now know the flavors of ginger, soy, and scallion, everyone has a favorite stir-fry, and many their own wok. Ironically, that means “easy’’ Chinese doesn’t have much of a market among cookbooks these days. There are terrific regional explorations such as Fuchsia Dunlop’s books, and there are comprehensive technique books such as Grace Young’s wonderful “Stir-Fry to the Sky’s Edge’’ (see Page 17). But a title like “Ching’s Everyday Easy Chinese’’ makes you wonder what you can learn if you know how to stir-fry, have a great Hunan cookbook, and go out for dim sum.

The answer is: more than you think. Taiwanese-born Ching-He Huang is a London-based Cooking Channel star. Her recipes are pan-Chinese and home-oriented, though she’s not afraid of an extra step here or there. As with other TV-based cookbooks, directions can be skeletal. But with a little reading between the lines, there’s good eating here.

Pork, ginger, and duck egg congee is satisfying, traditional, and perhaps slightly scary for breakfast. The preserved duck egg (a black jelly surrounding a murky green yolk) contributes a surprisingly subtle flavor. Huang doesn’t tell you what to do if your congee starts to stick, which it will, but just add water and stir like crazy.

Huang’s little dishes are uniformly crowd-pleasing. There’s an easy-to-love vegetable spring roll recipe that goes together in a flash and will win you the world’s-most-popular-mom award if you can tolerate the deep-frying mess. If you like oshitashi, the Japanese sesame spinach dish, you will recognize its influence in yellow bean sesame spinach. This one differs only in the use of yellow bean paste, a soy product that lends an earthy note.

I have always loved the dry, pressed tofu known as “tofu gan,’’ its smooth texture shown to great advantage in a salad with cool celery and the light, rice-vinegar, sweet-sesame dressing; it’s a crisply appealing last-minute dish and a welcome balance for richer foods.

Although most of the protein dishes in this book are scaled “2-4 to share,’’ it’s easy to proportion them so that you can fashion a family meal out of a single recipe. A fast and easy choice is hoisin chicken, which is briefly marinated, roasted, and tasty in a paper-napkin, finger-licking way. Zha jiang noodles are a casual favorite, topped with meat and vegetables. Huang’s version, featuring beef, green pepper, and shiitakes, is not the stunner that claims addicts worldwide, but it makes a sustaining dinner on a cold night.