Asian cooking

Sichuan flower pepper oil combines the spicy hotness of chili with the unique numbing sensation of flower pepper to give almost any dish an authetic Sichuan (Szechuan) flavour. It's very simple to make, taking only five or ten minutes - although flower pepper can be difficult to buy in some places.

“Food is one arena where Taipei — the world’s most underrated capital city, according to Monocle magazine — blows Beijing away. Its food incorporates more influences, spans street food to haute cuisine with greater aplomb and is out and out more delicious”, according to The New York Times.

Stir-frying is a very efficient way of cooking. Compared to oven cooking, it only takes a few minutes to complete a dish.

Stir-frying food with a wok also looks cool! It looks like you're performing on a TV cooking show. Adding a little bit of this and that – we can all look like a cooking superstar.

But in fact, stir-frying can quickly turn into a cooking disaster. The high heat necessary for wok cooking can burn the ingredients very rapidly, and then we panic, add too much soy sauce, vinegar and so on. So, surprisingly, these dishes can turn out to be a mess.

Korea's wonderful stone pot rice

October, 1999, was our first trip to Seoul. Almost as soon as we got into the city, we noticed the unbearably sour kimchi smell (fermented, pickled cabbage). We were feeling hungry after the flight from Taipei, but everywhere we looked, we couldn't avoid kimchi. Finally, we found a fried rice shop in a food court, so we could have some normal food.

I grew up with fried rice, it's part of our culture. Everywhere you go you see fried rice, every family eats fried rice. It has the same kind of position in the food culture as sandwiches in Western countries.

Black sugar is a common ingredient in Asian cooking, but when I show black sugar to my Western guests. They very often ask “is that brown sugar?”

Black sugar is healthier and more tasty than white processed sugar; brown sugar has a few of the benefits of black sugar, but really isn't as good.

In Taiwan, instead of having a cup of coffee, drinking soy milk is the way most people start the day. Breakfast shops serve the milk fresh and hot, and simply flavor it with some sugar.