The Veggie Chinese Takeout Cookbook: Wok, No Meat? Over 70 vegan and vegetarian takeout classics

by Kwoklyn Wan

Being vegan or vegetarian, or wanting to reduce your meat intake, doesn't mean missing out on fantastic takeaway favourites. The Veggie Chinese Takeaway Cookbook offers over 70 amazing meat-free recipes, most of which can easily be made vegan.

Genres: Cookbooks, Nonfiction, Food, Cooking, Vegetarian, China

160 pages, Hardcover

Published October 20, 2020

Reviews

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so much fun, it's a collection I can't wait to go back to! Have tried many of these recipes and have all been easy, well explained and tasted great!

The preparation and cooking symbols work well, it's easy to see the prep time and cooking time, all of the random recipes I tried were quick and done from start to finish in 20 mins or less and were easily cooked alongside other dishes of a similar timescale. I loved that these dishes worked well as a lunch or combined with other dishes for a main meal.

Very few dishes contained egg and the ones that did were given a replacement suggestion that worked absolutely fine. All of the dishes I tried were simple but tasted great and used easy to source ingredients. At the start of each recipe there's some facts about the dish that were really interesting and didn't feel forced to add a personal note or cultural reference but made for interesting reading!

Really loved all that we tried but particularly fell in love with the Panko Mushrooms with Dipping Sauce and have found the Eight Treasure Fried Rice a great side to many dishes. There are some wonderful soups and noodle dishes. Great for those who love vegetables, these recipes are really vegetable orientated, they also work well when I have tried variations using different vegetables, I love recipes that are good for this to use up what you have around and make the most of seasonal vegetables and minimise waste.

I also loved the recipes for sauces. I can only buy mushroom sauce in a plastic bottle so I was very pleased to find a recipe for making this. It was so easy and tasted great, so much better than the supermarket equivalent, I also love that this book includes details such as the mushroom sauce that makes a small jar can be kept in the fridge for a week and kept frozen for three months, this means you could make lots and freeze tablespoons in ice trays so you could have the right amount for using for future recipes and really importantly avoiding plastic bottles.

I find that with some cookery books I'm only interested in trying a handful of recipes but with this one I feel that I want to try every one! Slight downside which virtually all recipe books disappoint with, not every recipe has a photo, most do though and having tried a few that didn't have a photo I can say that it wasn't a problem and you didn't really need it for reference. I understand that including photos is costly so for budget reasons this sometimes happens. The many photos that are included are beautiful and certainly get your mouth watering. Favourite cookbook of the year so far!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Veggie Chinese Takeaway Cookbook by Kwoklyn Wan is a visually appealing book with a great selection of vegetarian recipes. The vibrant pictures and straightforward instructions make it a motivational read, especially for beginners. However, I was a bit disappointed to find that many recipes were not strictly Chinese but rather from various Asian countries, giving it more of a fusion feel. Despite this, the book does a wonderful job of offering delicious meat-free takes on classic takeaway dishes.

[Dray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely useful cookbook. Hits the sweet spot of home cooking- vegetarian, Chinese, relatively easy, well presented, delicious.

[Kirsty · Rating 2 out of 5]

Favourite recipes to try:
* Spring onion pancakes
* Sweet lotus barTaro, sesame and lotus puk puks
* Vegetable chow mein
* Spiced bok choy
* Sweet pickled ginger