The Asian Grocery Store Demystified

This is a real interesting book.It certainly helps you understand ingredients and how to look for them etc. Dont think you'd get all items listed as its american and obviously they have more choice etc.

This book is great! It breaks out each "mysterious" Asian ingredient by type and tells you what they are most commonly used for, also giving their English and Asian name. I've gone to my local Asian market many times blankly staring at 20 different kinds of Fish Sauce wondering which one is right for my dish, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Thailand or from the Philippines? It gives the name of Fish Sauce in each language in case there is no English on the bottle, nuoc mam in Vietnam nam pla in Thailand, patis in the Philippines and tuk trey in Cambodia. It describes what kind of containers it comes in and that the highest quality is found in glass containers. It is the basic salty, savory flavoring agent of SE Asia, replacing soy sauce. It tells you the sauce should be thin and caramel-colored liquid. This book is great as it also reccomends specific brands to purchase. Good brands are Bolden Boy, Aroy-D, Narcissus Fish Gravy,Tiparos and Caravelle. Store away from direct sunlight...and so on.I have been trying my hand at Thai food for about a year now. The most intimidating things I've found is navigating the Asian market and purchasing just the right ingredients and mostly wondering why there are so many isles of dried seaweed.This book is also the perfect size to stow away in your purse to take with you while shopping. Its also just the right size to stuff a shopping list into or would even fit into a pocket. The back of the book has several pages for Notes. Its my new favorite thing!Happy shopping!

The best book for the novice Asian grocery store shopper. I have The Indian Grocery Store Demystified by the same author and it is a wealth of info too. This lady does some serious homework and I am impressed by the sheer volume of products covered. Extremely informative and a must-have if you are serious about shopping and cooking Asian foods.

`The Asian Grocery Store Demystified' by book designer and illustrator, Linda Bladholm is an exposition of Oriental ingredients with a very nice little twist which saves it from being a poor man's `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients'. While Cost's classic book deals with the serious culinary details of a great many basic ingredients, Ms. Bladholm's book, as suggested by her title, is much more pointedly directed at the shopper's experience in your typical strip mall Oriental market.The author adds appeal and charm to her book by opening it with a visit to her own local mom and pop run Oriental grocery store. The store in question was just a bit better organized and stocked than my own favorite Filipino run store in southern New Jersey, but all the familiar staples were there, if not in all the familiar places.The device of providing a guided tour of an Asian market is reinforced by mentioning all the major brand names for staples such as rice, noodles, sauces, oils, and spice mixes, with opinions by the author of which may be the preferred brands. While I found a few misstatements, such as describing a gluten free flour as `general purpose' (general purpose flours by definition have 10% to 12% gluten producing proteins), and I missed some possible warnings against Texmati rice as a less than useful substitute for Basmati rice, I believe the advice and information in this book is a really great supplement to other books on Asian ingredients with a more scholarly bent.By far the biggest weakness of the book is the difference in quality between the promise of `over 400 illustrations of ingredients' and the quality of those illustrations. The illustrations in the book are all small black and white line drawings easily fitting into an inch square area with lots of the pictures giving no sense of the kind of thing they are depicting. The little picture of ginger certainly looks like the ginger with which I am familiar, but the picture of the related galangal rhizome does little to assure me that I would be able to use that picture to pick it out from bins of produce labeled in Chinese characters. These poor illustrations give the lie to the claim that this is a `Take It With You' guide, in that it is dealing with a guide to items which may all be labeled in not only a foreign language, but in a script we are simply not used to interpreting. The very clever chapter headings of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalong and Korean ideograms for food categories (with English translations) do nothing to help the situation.Note that unlike many other books on Asian ingredients, this book has few recipes using these ingredients. This is not necessarily a weakness, as it means that almost all the space in the book is dedicated to the book's principle topic, the groceries. And, much of this space is dedicated to subjects which purely culinary books may not touch such as teas and medicinal herbs and spices. This is probably not the best book on these subjects, but treating these topics enhances the treatment of the book's primary metaphor, the Asian grocery store,, as they do, in fact, appear in Asian grocery stores. My most satisfying discovery was the appearance of classic frozen `fast foods' such as potstickers and Chinese dumplings. After our 25 pound sacks of rice, the primary reason for going to our favorite Asian market was to pick up a supply of frozen pork dumplings.The book also does a nice job of featuring those things that are uniquely Chinese or Japanese. The short appendix on oriental cooking methods and utensils is not too helpful. These will be of little value if your Asian store has a good selection of cooking utensils. It does not, for example, give any clues about the various styles of woks or the various materials or what makes a good wok. This is especially important, as the criteria for a good wok are almost exactly the opposite of those for a good modern saute pan.This book is great if you find yourself living within easy shopping distance of a good Oriental market, assuming that market covers all of east Asia and not, for example, just India and Pakistan. The book also useful if you plan to order lots of Asian groceries over the Internet, as the recommended brands gives one some assurance they are not buying sawdust. The book is less valuable for the culinary generalist, who has no special interest in Asian cuisine, especially in that the book includes no bibliography. For those readers, Bruce Cost's book mentioned above is far superior a source.

A really comprehensive guide to the mysteries of the Asian grocery store. I took my copy to my favorite Asian market and the owner wanted to know where I got the book. Said he could sell them right by the register. Very helpful both in shopping and for cross-referencing while cooking.