Waterstones Pok Pok
774 ratings
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Price: £30.00
Brand: Waterstones
Description: After decades spent traveling throughout Thailand, Andy Ricker wanted to bring the country's famed street food stateside. In 2005 he opened Pok Pok, so named for the sound a pestle makes when it strikes a clay mortar, in an old shack in a residential neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Ricker's traditional take on Thai food soon drew the notice of the New York Times and Gourmet magazine, establishing him as a culinary star. Now, with his first cookbook, Ricker tackles head-on the myths that keep people from making Thai food at home: that it's too spicy for the American palate or too difficult to source ingredients. Fifty knockout recipes for simple and delicious Thai dishes range from Grilled Pork Collar with Spicy Dipping Sauce and Iced Greens to Andy's now-famous Vietnamese Fish Sauce Wings. Including a primer in Thai techniques and flavor profiles, with tips for modifying local produce to mimic Thai flavors, Pok Pok makes authentic Thai food accessible to any home cook.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781607742883
Delivery cost: 0.00
ISBN: 9781607742883
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Author: Anon
Rating: 5
Review: If you're looking to recreate genuine Thai flavours at home, in the Western world, this is definitely the book. Straight talking and a helping hand even for the inexperienced. Lots of recipes and lovely stories about the people who contributed as well.
Author: Matt P
Rating: 3
Review: This book is take-no-prisoners authentic, which is both good and bad. Good because the recipes are challenging and different - and taste and look amazing. Bad because he has a maniacal obsession with doing things the hard way, for example: "Only a mortar and pestle will do" for making sauce bases. For a multi component dish there's no way it's going to ruin a recipe to use a blender and it will take you one tenth of the time and you'll get a smoother result. Recipe quantities are given in weights not units, so for example "11 grams garlic cloves". If your palate is capable of detecting the difference between four and five cloves of garlic in a sauce that has nine other ingredients, I take my hat off to you. There's loads of nutty chef superstitions in there, overspecifying the method for no good reason. 'Add the ginger and blend, then add the garlic and blend further; finally add the galangal and blend again'. I know Andy, how about adding all three at the same time because it'll make no difference to the final outcome whatsoever?!? This kind of attitude pervades the whole book. If you're an experienced home cook (by which I mean, someone who's cooked a lot of recipes from books) then you should be able to see through the bullsh*t and make your life easier, but it takes a bit of effort. Finally he presumably knows about shortcuts but has chosen not to share them for reasons of ideological purity. I was quizzing the owner of my Thai supermarket (one of the top 5 in the UK) about weird ingredients for one particular dish until eventually he goes "Oh you're making laab? Just use this sachet!" and produced a pre-prepared spice mix. I mean, it's great to have the true original from-scratch recipe, but it would have been nice to know about the sachet, especially since the true recipe would have taken me another two hours. Anyway the food was all absolutely terrific and if you read it with a sceptical eye, you'll love it.
