Tiffy Cooks by Tiffy Chen

Here is another cookbook review from 2024 that I found in my draft posts.

Chen is another social media star/food blogger made good. (It seems like every single cookbook I pick up is either by a podcaster, Insta-personality, TikTok star or blogger. More power to them!) She shares her home cooking skills by connecting us to traditional family recipes, some that she has modified along the way,  while weaving in personal stories. (If you haven’t been to her site, do so as soon as you are able:  Tiffy Cooks.)

About the book:

The wildly popular blogger and TikTok sensation behind Tiffy Cooks shares 88 of her favorite easy, everyday, family-style recipes from across Asia.

Tiffy Chen started blogging about food and recipes after learning to cook from her mother and grandmother. In her debut cookbook, Tiffy shares memories and recipes shaped by growing up in Taiwan—a country with rich culture, diverse cuisines, and some of the best street food in the world—along with beloved family recipes and unique dishes inspired by her travels across Southeast Asia.

With eighty-eight (a very lucky number in Chinese culture) flavor-packed recipes, Tiffy offers her favorite quick and easy everyday dishes, like a classic Taiwanese Breakfast Sandwich and her grandmother’s Sesame Chicken Rice. Also included are family-style dishes to pass around and enjoy, from Drunken Chicken and Braised Five-Spice Beef to Garlic and Scallion Lobster and Braised Sticky Pork Belly. You’ll find favorites like bao, buns, wontons, and dumplings that are great to make in bulk—all freezer-friendly to help you save time and have them on hand for when the mood strikes!

With gorgeous step-by-step photography and heartwarming stories about traveling in Asia and finding the best street food in Taiwan, Tiffy Cooks celebrates Asian food and family in this must-make collection of go-to, easy recipes.

What I thought…

Chen promises stories throughout and she delivers. She truly comes from a food-loving family and that’s evident through her family “sampling food” vacations. She moved to Vancouver in her tweens with her mom and sister and found the food culture-shock to be hard. When she enrolled in a small university in Ontario, she forced herself to cook the foods she found the most comforting.  A four-month trip traveling to Southeast Asia after graduation sealed her foodie fate. Even though she started working at a Fortune-500 company, her free time was spent cooking.

She left to pursue her TikTok success in 2020. The rest, as she says, is history.

Chen starts her book with a list of basic tools and (more importantly) condiments and spices. They’re both pretty definitive lists.

I was very intrigued by the “Quick and Easy All Day” section which contains four breakfast recipes plus Traditional Silky Soy Milk and Taiwanese Peanut Rice Milk; four noodle recipes; five rice recipes; two soups; three salads; and eleven entrees. Of these, I will have to try the Taiwanese XXL Fried Chicken (79).

Part 2 is entitled “Family-Style Dining.” It includes Small Plates, Family Style Entrees (chicken, pork, beef, seafood).

Part 3 is “Make in Bulk” and contains recipe and detailed pictorial instructions for bao, steamed flower rolls, Chinese steamed buns, crispy pork buns, vegetable buns, dumplings, and wontons. I was very impressed with the step-by-step directions.

“Dessert and Drinks” (Part 4), may have been my favorite! I have earmarked Honey Cake (224-225) as well as a few from the drinks section—Taiwanese Fruit Tea (233) and Traditional Taiwanese Pineapple Syrup (236).

Chen doesn’t leave without tutorials and recipes on rice, making hand-cut noodles, chili oil, garlic oil.

While I wasn’t in love with her writing style (I like a little more humor mixed in), the recipes and instructions are impressive.

I’m also linking up with Foodies Read for January.

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