Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge: The Ultimate Guide to Mastery, with Authentic Recipes and Stories (An Award-Winning Cookbook)

I waited quite a long time after buying this book to review this book-- about 9 months. I really feel like I'm ready to review it now.This book changed my life and my family's life. I know that must sound a bit like an exaggeration, but it is 100% true. We are not cooks. We have never been cooks. Nearly every meal I've ever eaten has come from take out. My wife and I decided it was silly that we were full grown adults and had no idea how to cook. This book didn't just teach us "stir-fry", it taught us how to cook.Grace's book is well-thought out, well-written, and has clear explanations and photographs of all procedures mentioned within the book. This is not a recipe book. Grace takes the time to explain which wok is right for your kitchen, which ingredients you need in your pantry, which techniques you must use for cutting, dicing and preparing all vegetables, meats and proteins.I've always been envious of people who can just "throw something together" and never really understood how that worked. Now I do! Now I can just throw a dinner together with whatever is in the fridge and it comes out great. It's remarkable.The truth is, the concepts in this book are for more valuable than the recipes. Want to know another truth? We never really use this book anymore. After you learn the concepts and you can just throw something together, the recipes are kind of irrelevant. We're too busy to follow a recipe. Don't get me wrong, the recipes are great and if we really feel like preparing something within the book, we make a list of ingredients and go to the store and buy them-- and everything turns out delicious. But that really, truly is not the point. The point is, after you read this book, you can cook-- anything.Because of Grace's book we use our wok almost every single night. We do not have Chinese food every single night. Now that we understand the basic concepts of stir fry and can just "throw things together" we throw together mexican food, indian food, make up our own dishes, etc. The wok is not just for Chinese food, it's for all foods and we get that now. It's the most used pan in our house.Moreover, the more you use your wok, the better it becomes AND the less oil you use. Whatever style food you may be preparing, the wok cooking allows you to use far less oil than you might otherwise. So, in addition to it being FAST (average time to cook a meal is three minutes), it's extremely healthy. And again, the more you use the wok, the more seasoned it becomes, the less oil you use. It actually becomes healthier with each passing use. What else can you say that about?Of course I would know none of these things if I hadn't bought this book. If you want to learn to cook, if you want to know how to just throw something together and have it work, if you want to make great meals for your family very quickly you should buy this book-- and buy it first. THEN, after buying the book, you'll know which wok to get for your stove (and where to get it), which basic oils and such that you must always have on hand; how to season your wok, etc. In short, you'll be ready not only to wok, but ready to cook.Thank you Grace Young!

I have to start by saying I simply adore this cookbook. This book brought me to Chinese cooking, and this is coming from a person who loves Thai food and never goes to Chinese restaurants. I still don't go because I don't know of any top notch ones to go to, and besides, I can cook fabulous Chinese food at home now. However, I have such a new-found appreciation for Chinese cooking that I never had at all before. What you eat in typical American Chinese restaurants is emphatically NOT what these recipes will produce. These recipes are entirely different. And I learned off the bat how what I used to cook in my pathetic stainless steel wok was NOT proper stir frying for myriad reasons that I learned in reading this cookbook. I threw out my stainless wok and bought a proper one.This book is such a visual treat to begin with. Beautiful, thick, slick type pages with gorgeous decorative elements on the pages, wonderful use of colors, beautiful photos of the food. I went into exploring a renewed fascination with getting a wok and learning the "real" way to do Chinese cooking. This book has it all, but you must have the patience and desire to read all of Grace's wonderful information: the essential cooking tools and what to do with them, how to buy and season a wok, all the various unique ingredients to be used with photos of them, even photos of the cans and jars of various substances so you know exactly what to buy, good information on cooking oils and which to buy for wok cooking, and much more. Everything is beautifully organized and presented. The first 63 pages are devoted to this very necessary background information, and every bit of it is useful and enjoyable. If you want to do this right, every page should be read carefully as you will absorb all the information into your mental databank of knowledge about Chinese wok cooking. None of the recipes is difficult or complex to do, but the prep for wok cooking takes time while the actual cooking does not! If you are looking for superficial, quick and easy, then this isn't the right book for you. If you want to learn, understand and appreciate this type of cuisine, this book is fabulous.Among the most important things I learned was about the wok, the oil, the heat, how to cut the meat properly, about marinating (very different!). Grace Young gives a world of background details that have been invaluable to me. Now to the recipes: I waited to review until I'd had this book around 4 months and had tried a lot of the recipes. They are fabulous, I've loved every one of the dozen or so I've tried at this point. I have a few that are such favorites I keep doing them over and over. Standouts for me are Stir-Fried Ginger Beef, Cantonese Style Stir Fried Pork with Chinese Broccoli, Hot Pepper Beef, Stir Fried Curried Beef, Stir Fried Mongolian Lamb with Scallions (I used beef), Trinidadian Chicken with Mango Chutney, Spicy Orange Chicken, Hong Kong Style Mango Ginger Chicken, and well, quite a few more. Not a dud among them, all fabulous in my opinion. I've never had a cookbook in which I liked so many of the recipes and kept making them over and over. I use recipes from this book at least twice a week. I'll also mention that there are recipe sections for seafood and vegetarian/tofu type dishes, but I haven't tried any of them yet because I'm less of a fish person, and have simply found the meat and chicken recipes so interesting so I've been stuck within the beef, pork and chicken recipe sections. I'll get to the others eventually.In addition, interspersed throughout the book are very interesting historical notes and personal profiles for various displaced Chinese cooks that Grace has met, and who have taken their traditional Chinese recipes and added things influenced by the area they emigrated to, such as the Caribbean. The recipe for Trinidadian Chicken with Mango Chutney is an example of this.I can't recommend this cookbook enough, and it's such a fascinating and pleasurable book to work with. If you have even the slightest interest in Chinese cooking, you'll completely enjoy this book and give it the time and attention it deserves.