To my dearest wife Dee, for foregoing our precious evenings together, and to the TV for filling in my husband gap while I’ve been writing into the morning. To my kids Theo and Rosa, thank you for your patience, and for waiting weeks on end for me to find the time to take you to the park! And to my sisters, my mum and my late dad for providing all those unforgettable feasting moments while I was growing up.

HOW TO USE THIS EBOOK

Select one of the chapters from the main contents list and you will be taken to a list of all the recipes covered in that chapter.

Alternatively, jump to the index to browse recipes by ingredient.

Look out for linked text (which is in blue) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between related recipes.

You can double tap images and tables to increase their size. To return to the original view, just tap the cross in the top left-hand corner of the screen.

CONTENTS

Family Feasts

The wok clock

Building a feast

Chinese

Thai

Singaporean

Vietnamese

Malaysian

Indonesian

Pinoy

Korean

Japanese

Desserts

Index

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Family Feasts

If I were a purist, I would be constantly scolding myself for shunning every bit of established eating etiquette, but in the Pang household that’s just not how we roll. Growing up, feasting was an everyday ritual, but with two hungry sisters and a constant influx of random family friends joining us for last-minute dinners, there was no time to be polite at the table. We were taught that the biggest respect we could give the food was to get stuck in while it was piping hot, especially if it was a freshly stir-fried lobster, whole steamed fish or crispy chicken that would lose its crispiness with every additional minute that it waited on the plate. And by immediately tucking in, we were also honouring the skills of the chef. I can recall my dad’s pride when he arrived at the table, just after serving up the last plateful, to find only a little of his showstopper dish left for him to add to his rice bowl – he saw our frenzied attack on his food as the most sincere form of appreciation.

Chopsticks are ideal for such occasions as these, not just because they are fun to use but because their length helps you to reach for whatever you want from across the table. However, if there’s one bit of dining etiquette I do hold to, it’s this: don’t double dip with your chopsticks! If you haven’t got any spare serving chopsticks, then either ask your guests to turn their chopsticks upside down to use the other end to load up their bowls or provide each dish with a large serving spoon or two so that it’s easier for everyone to pounce on the meal.

Feasting is ingrained in Asian eating culture no matter what part of the continent you look towards. A spoonful of noodles or a clump of sticky rice perched on the end of your chopsticks are seen as the foundation from which to create a variety of combinations — perfectly placed to mop up the silky, sweet, salty, savoury sauces from steaming hot flakes of fish or melt-in-the-mouth morsels of slow-braised meat. Asian food is able to entice both the taste buds and the mind, and this, the latest School of Wok cookbook, is ready to do just that.

Drawing inspiration from each main culinary tradition and practice found across the continent, chapter by chapter, this book presents a wide variety of dishes for coaxing out the feeders among you to delight family and friends, with the caveat that each dish will work equally well served on their own with a bowl of rice or noodles. In addition to practical tips and tricks to enable you to explore the world of Asian cuisine in new and adventurous ways, the book will help you to build your confidence in preparing multiple dishes at a time and, before you know it, you’ll be filling your table with simple family feasts that everyone will want to devour and revisit again and again, creating a secondary feast of memories to nourish your soul.

Of course, half the battle of serving more than one dish, or one dish with several components, is making sure each item is presented at its ideal temperature, with hot dishes presented piping hot while salads are kept chilled and crisp, to provide that refreshing crunch in between the chopstickfuls of rice. This is where my section on Building a Feast and The Feasting Wheel will prove invaluable in guiding you through planning your cooking.

Entertaining the Asian way is not just a matter of cooking a recipe and plonking a plate of the food in front of your guests, so as the host, once you’ve cooked up your feast, make sure you keep on serving your guests after allowing them to help themselves – you will be amazed at how rewarding this generosity of care will feel. Serving and sharing the results of your hard graft in the kitchen with others in a genuine, unpretentious way can provide a deep sense of fulfilment, as well as creating memorable moments for everyone around the table. So let’s get stuck in!

The Wok Clock

The Wok Clock is such a simple and practical way of helping home cooks to be super-organized in their kitchen that it has found its way into cooking demonstrations across the world, besides being referenced all over the internet and talked about in almost every TV show I have been lucky enough to participate in. And I’m pretty sure it’ll follow me way past my retirement.

Essentially, at School of Wok, we like to arrange our prepared ingredients in a systematic manner, using a round plate as a Wok Clock. This approach is not exclusive to wok cooking; it’s an incredibly useful tool for all types of home cooking. Once you have prepared all your ingredients, arrange them around the plate in the order in which you’ll need them, beginning at 12 o’clock and working your way around the plate, clockwise. Whether you’re making a stir-fry or a slower-cooked curry, or even setting up a long list of ingredients that need to be pounded using a pestle and mortar at a particular point in the preparation process, it ‘woks’ well!

Where appropriate in this book, the Wok Clock approach has been used as a simple guide to preparation so that you’re ready to proceed with the recipe in an organized way. Once you get into the habit of using the Wok Clock method, you’ll find that every aspect of your cooking will become more straightforward and efficient, freeing you up to relish the joys of preparing dishes and whole feasts and learning new cooking techniques rather than having to painstakingly consult every last sentence of the recipe. Once you have tried a few recipes, you can simply refer to the illustrated Wok Clocks to help you ‘wok’ your way through without having to over-analyse a recipe every time you decide to cook something new. ‘Wok’s’ not to love? (OK, I’ll stop now.)

Building a Feast

There’s so much more to Asian cuisine than just cooking one dish at a time. So here’s how to up your game and get organized enough to cook like a traditional Asian aunty or uncle might and present a combination of dishes for everyone to share. When cooking a feast at home, however simple or complex, finding a balance of flavour, colour and texture throughout the dishes you put together is essential. Although taking into account these different factors can feel a bit daunting at the outset, once you achieve a balance of these three key elements, you’ll succeed in creating a feast that you and your family and friends won’t be able to resist. Great for cooking accolades, bad for leftovers, as everyone will be digging in until the very last morsel of food has been devoured!

Flavour Balance: This is really just the beginning when it comes to nailing that moreish result. The flavours of the base ingredients and sauces set the scene and provide direction for the rest of the dish. In Asian cuisine we aim to reach every part of the palate, utilizing all our taste buds to create a journey through sweet, sour, salty, spicy, savoury and, last but equally important, bitter. There’s a certain skill in knowing which recipes to choose to complement each other and create a natural balance of all these flavours when eaten together.

Colour Balance: As we always say at School of Wok: ‘feast with your eyes’, and this means making your selection of food, whether presented as a single plate or a mix of dishes, aesthetically pleasing. Fortunately, this is easy to achieve in Asian cuisine, as if you’ve picked the right balance of elements or dishes in terms of the other two main categories of flavour and texture, it’s likely that you’ll naturally end up with a beautiful array of colours on the table.

Texture Balance: This aspect is often overlooked and slightly more difficult to explain but crucial to elevating a feast from a random selection of dishes to something irresistible, because truly satisfying food is just as much about its texture as its flavour. When considering texture, simply follow the same principle as balancing flavour and ask yourself the question: how can you reach every part of the palate with varying textures? Crispy, fluffy, a gentle bite, chewy, pillowy soft, flaky, slippery, tongue-numbing, drying and melt-in-the-mouth all come to mind, yet they are just a few of the vast dictionary of descriptive terms for food texture. Once you start looking at all these different textural qualities, you’ll find that they closely correspond to the key cooking techniques within East and South East Asian cuisines. In the Feasting Wheel, you’ll find a breakdown of each major texture featured in this book: Juicy & Succulent, Crunchy, Silky & Melt-in-the-Mouth, A Gentle Bite and Crispy.

THE FEASTING WHEEL

As you may have deduced from my dedication to the Wok Clock, I love the very nature of circles or spheres, the most perfectly uniform and continuous of shapes, and I am of the belief that every good thing is round for a reason: life, our planet, a football, the perfect droplet of stock or soy sauce skittering across an extremely hot pan...So, I’d like to present another round of goodness, the Feasting Wheel – a wheel of foodie fortune to help you cook up a feast for your whole family or group of friends with ease. I invite you to take a glimpse into my brain to understand how my mind figures out exactly what to put on the dinner table.

Think of the Feasting Wheel as a multifaceted pie chart of balance and organization where I have already done the hard work in planning the preparation and cooking of a feast for you. Taking into account texture balance and cooking techniques, the Feasting Wheel will help you devise your plan of action for cooking two or more dishes for a mini family feast or a full-on banquet for your friends.

Each of the chapters in this book (apart from Desserts) presents a range of dishes within each type of Asian cuisine that in combination constitute a well-balanced feast. In the introduction to each chapter I will give you guidance on how to approach each feast, and talk you through the Feasting Wheel for that particular cuisine – see here where I use the Feasting Wheel from the Chinese chapter to illustrate how the dishes complement each other in detail.

To begin your feasting journey, however, I recommend picking out individual dishes that you would like to make for a midweek meal or a home-cooked treat, and gain experience cooking one dish at a time. Then, following the order of the wheel, you can start to add a salad or a side and build up to tackling several dishes at a time while keeping yourself organized and maintaining enough space on your hob, free from undue fuss and stress. For example, once your roasting dish is in the oven with a timer on to check or baste at the appropriate stage, you can get the slow cooking underway, such as braising or making a nice saucy curry. And while that’s simmering, there’s plenty of time to prepare and finish off the quicker dishes that will add that essential crisp or crunch to your feast. As with the Wok Clock, I recommend starting at 12 o’clock and, depending on which dishes you have selected, working your way clockwise around the segments of the wheel in organizing your order of preparation. By starting small, such as picking one main dish and a salad, and then adding an extra dish each time you cook from that chapter, you’ll soon find it much easier to put more dishes on the table all at once.

Instinctively, you might think that the last item to prepare for each feast would be the salad. But it’s important to remember that the best way to present any meal is to ensure that any dishes that need to be hot are served as piping hot as possible, and any dishes that require quick cooking are tackled in the final 10–15 minutes. Therefore, when it comes to salads and other uncooked dishes, these should be prepared when you have a pocket of free time and then stored in the fridge to keep fresh so that you can focus on the last-minute touches of your feast when your guests arrive.

Do note however that, even as a professional chef, I would rarely attempt to cook all eight dishes of any chapter in one go! Rather, I would max out at around four or five to avoid doubling up on similar textures or overstressing when cooking at home. Just remember, always try to include the crunchy veg dish no matter how big or small your feast, so that the larger and heartier dishes don’t overload the palate.

I hope you enjoy your cooking journey and adventures as much I have enjoyed creating this book for you. Have fun ‘wokking’ around your clocks, feast away and I look forward to seeing all your attempts and triumphs!

TEXTURE TIPS

Throughout the book, each of the main textures (Juicy & Succulent, Crunchy, Silky & Melt-in-the-mouth, A Gentle Bite and Crispy) are represented by icons both on the Feasting Wheels and on the individual recipes. This should help you to quickly get the measure of each dish and aid your decision-making in composing your own simple feasts. Although some recipes will provide more than one texture, I have focused on the most prominent texture of each dish to make things as straightforward as possible. Also bear in mind that each recipe works as a stand-alone dish and doesn’t have to be prepared alongside any others – the Feasting Wheel and texture icons are merely there to guide you if and when you feel adventurous enough to tackle cooking more than one dish at a time.