Tools You Must Have

I am not asian, however as we all know, asians know how to cook. Since I happen to have a lot of cool asian friends, I enjoy learning as much as I possibly can from the.

Cooking Chopsticks (Waribashi)

These are essentially a pair of long chopsticks, used for cooking. They are cheap, very easy to clean, and if you can work a pair of chopsticks, they're like having a pair of long, heat-resistant fingers. Awesome.

I use mine for...

  • picking a noodle from the pot (or a broccoli from the curry) to see if it's ready
  • turning a crepe
  • getting that piece of warped toast neatly out of the toaster
  • and when absolutely necessary, extracting rubber bands from the garbage disposal unit

Chinese meat cleaver

These are the square-ish meat cleavers which have a flat blade edge. The key differences between this kind of knife and your chopping knife are that the taller body gives you something to push down on, and the added weight on the blade gives a smoother cut on harder substances.

Choose a sharp, comfortable-sized one, with a non-slip handle. It does not need to be large or heavy to work well.

I actually prefer my meat cleaver to my chopping knife, for its many uses...

  • Cutting frozen meat, such as separating a chunk of mince from the frozen package
  • Cutting frozen seafood and vegetables
  • Cutting cheese! The large flat blade is surprisingly good at thin slices of cheese from the block, both hard and soft cheeses.
  • Cutting raw corn and other extra-hard raw veggies

Tip: Cut the tip and tail off of your corn before you shuck the greens off; it will go very easily and you can't eat those parts anyway...

Before You Buy a Chinese Cleaver

Chinese insulated soup pot

Basically, it's a pot inside of a thermal container. You bring the soup ingredients to a boil, put the pot in the insulated container, and wait.

It cooks amazingly fast, and without the use of continuous heat.

Besides it's many soup uses, it's incredibly good at cooking dried pasta, and fast fast.

Steamer

Rice cooker

Mostly, you'd only need this if you use rice often. However it does tend to make rice more nicely (and less messily) than the typical western stovetop method.

But you can do a lot more with a rice cooker, such as make soft-boiled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and various rice porridges.