Product Description

Rick Stein's Far Eastern Odyssey is an epic culinary journey along rivers, through jungles and around coastlines. Along the way, Rick visits traditional family-run restaurants, street vendors, floating markets, night markets, fishing villages, and the local cinnamon and rice farmers to learn about the authentic food of the Far East, and to sample the delicious spectrum of exotic flavours.

In Vietnam he tracks down the best recipe for pho, a searing soup of vegetables, shrimp, chilli and fresh mint; in Cambodia he makes kroeung, a kind of aromatic curry; and he samples jhol, a light fish stew, in Bangladesh. Travelling on through Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Indonesia, he'll enjoy (and show us how to make) an array of inspired dishes.

In this tie-in cookery book to the series, Rick shares his new-found knowledge, recreating the tantalizing food of his travels and capturing on the plate the rich and varying cultures of the Far East. With over 150 new recipes and breathtaking on-location photography, this book evokes the magic of bustling markets, exotic locations and exciting flavours.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #26 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

About the Author
Rick Stein OBE is one of Britain's favourite cookery writers and chefs. In 2004 he was named the BBC Food Personality of the Year at the BBC Radio Food and Farming Awards for his Food Heroes television series. His other TV programmes include Rick Stein's Taste of the Sea and Seafood Lovers' Guide - which won the Television Programme Award at the Glenfiddich Award for Food Book of the Year, and Taste of the Sea, which won both the 1995 Andre Simon Memorial Fund Food Book Award and the 1996 Good Food Award for Cookery Book of the Year. His most recent seafood book, Rick Stein's Seafood, won the coveted James Beard Foundation Cookbook of the Year Award in 2005. Rick Stein owns The Seafood Restaurant in Padstow, Cornwall, which every year attracts thousands of fish lovers from Britain and abroad. He also runs the highly acclaimed Padstow Seafood School, two smaller restaurants, St. Petroc's Bistro and Rick Stein's Cafe, a deli and a fish-and-chip takeaway. Rick was awarded his OBE in 2003 for services to tourism.

Customer Reviews

Tasty recipes and sumptuous photography
We're really enjoying Rick's latest series on BBC HD at the moment - his enthusiasm and respect for the cuisine really shines through, and after each show we always really want to try and recreate his dishes (and of course, enjoy eating them!)

This book contains all the great recipes Rick shares on the show, and seeing them in print just underlines how simple they are to cook really. Rick gives you a little background or history for each dish, and his down-to-earth style includes tips along the way to make things easy or even avert potential disasters (like the wok on the back burner tip, so you don't pour super-hot oil all over yourself by accident!) The photography is also sumptuous, and it's always good to know the effect you're going for anyway :-)

You'll need access to a good supermarket or perhaps a Chinese supermarket like the Wing Yip chain, but I can confirm it's worth the effort just to recreate those wonderful flavours.

Overall, this book is a no-brainer if you're a fan of the series, a fan of oriental cooking, or both.

Fabulous Food
Every page of this fantastic book has another wonderful recipe. It's set to become one of my most used sources, and we cook a lot! Whilst the recipes aren't complicated, they do involve quite a bit of prep, and a lot of time shopping in Asian supermarkets which won't be easy for everyone. Some also look deceptively simple until you see you have a whole paste or sauce to make from the section at the back. Having said that we "dined in" Cambodia last week, Malaysia over the weekend, and Vietnam tomorrow all from the comfort of our kitchen, and there's still hundreds more recipes to make. Really thrilled with the book, its a must buy for lovers of Asian food who enjoy the smells of kaffir lime and lemongrass wafting through the house.

A collection of fine recipes
Rick Stein comes up with the goods again, with a collection of extremely satisfying dishes (or at least the ones we've tried so far are!). One review so far has complained about needing specialised ingredients - its almost as if cooking Asian food might actually require Asian ingredients! It's true that access to an Asian food shop would be handy for some (but not all) of the recipes, but that's hardly surprising (and there are online stores available). To cook high quality, authentic dishes, will obviously require the appropriate goods and high quality dishes will be the result of cooking with this excellent book.