"Pok Pok: A Journey Through the Cuisine of Thailand - Recipes and Stories from the Streets, Homes, and Roadside Restaurants" Cookbook

Christi: I ordered 2 Thai cookbooks and they both arrived in good condition and had a lot of beautiful illustrations.

United States on Nov 08, 2023

ken: I started to assemble all the ingrediates to make some of the dishes 200.00 dollars later I have a lot of ingredients now I need a thai chef to teach me.It is hard even with fairly simple writen instrutions.in this book.

United States on Sep 03, 2023

G: Ive had this book for a while, but have put of making recipes as they seemed very involved. I just bit the bullet a couple of weeks ago and spent a leisurely Saturday afternoon putting together the green curry. Worth every minute! Just made the muu sateh today, and even dusted off the ol charcoal grill to cook them the traditional way. Again, scrumptious.
A way around the long prep time, of course, would be to double or even quadruple the base pastes and freeze them, depending on how often you think youll be cooking Thai food.
I also found that using a scale is essential. Being within a couple of grams pf whats written in the book has so far produced wonderful results.
Profiles of Thai friends and cooks makes this a fascinating book!

Canada on Sep 02, 2023

TS: Recipes include the cultural context, the flavour of the place which they come from and clear instructions.
The food feels authentic, surprising, nourishing.
A bit of effort is required to collect the ingredients but the effort is very well worth it.

Canada on Aug 12, 2023

liarns delos reyes: Item arrived safely with no damage!

Will buy again!

United States on Jul 03, 2023

dave macdonald: I'm upset that the product information didn't alert me to the fact that this book was written for the American market. including measurements. ingredient availability etc. Recipes are authentic, detailed and delicious.

United Kingdom on Mar 22, 2023

Anon: 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.

United Kingdom on Mar 17, 2022

Esther Schindler: My husband used to travel regularly to Portland Oregon, where he became a devotee of the Pok Pok restaurant. So when the cookbook was first announced, I immediately pre-ordered a copy... way back in 2013. However, I didn't actually cook a recipe from it until this week.

Huh? How could I possibly do that, and still give the cookbook 5 stars? Easy: Think of it as food journalism and picture-book food porn, and it's still awesome. I compare it to cookbooks like those from Heston Blumenthal; it doesn't bother me that this is a "reading" cookbook rather than one that's going to earn food stains.

Pok Pok is about doing Thai cooking *authentically*. While the U.S. has embraced Thai cuisine enthusiastically, I learned, we don't have access to all the same ingredients as people do in Thailand. Nor do we have (or take) the time to prepare everything from scratch, especially when that means creating two or three ingredients that are each time-consuming processes. (I learned this first-hand in the 80s, when the closest Thai restaurant was 250 miles away. If I wanted to use a half cup of coconut milk in the peanut sauce for chicken sate, I had to start out by making the coconut...

United States on May 09, 2016

Matt P: 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...

United Kingdom on Nov 08, 2015

Shawn C.Shawn C.: This is probably the most detailed cookbook I've ever read. The directions for each recipe are ridiculously thorough, down to the ingredient list (for example: "1 (14 gram) piece peeled fresh or frozen (not defrosted) galangal, thinly sliced against the grain." Each recipe also has a flavor profile section that tells you what flavors to expect, and what other dishes in the book pairs with it. Besides the recipes, there are tons of pictures, some of which serve as guides to help you identify ingredients (the herb gallery on pg 16-17 for example). The only problem I might come across is how to get my hands on some of the ingredients locally (the book does offer suggestions on which websites to source the goods).Overall, really good book, definitely worth my money.

edit (01/09/14): To date I have made the Stir-fried water spinach, Stir-fried brussels sprouts, Whole roasted chicken, Salty-sweet mango coconut rice, and Pad see ew. Let me tell you how they went:

Stir fried water spinach: Didn't have a scale on the first try, big mistake, used too little spinach, too salty. Problem solved when I bought a kitchen scale for the second try and got the portions right, tasted...

United States on Oct 30, 2013