Writing Easy Chinese Food Anyone Can Make, Emma Chung is sharing recipes anyone can whip up on a weekday night with simple ingredients
Emma Chung described working at School of Wok, an Asian cookery school in London, as a mix between “working at a restaurant and on Broadway at the same time, performing every night.”
“My second interview for the job,” Emma remembers, “was that I had to teach my bosses how to cook as if they weren’t cooks, preparing a dish with leftovers in the fridge and teaching them how to chop ginger, prepare sauce, and cook noodles.”
At the same time, the Hong Konger took to Instagram to share simple recipes during her four-year-stay in London, dishes like spring onion pancake, Chinese hamburger, spicy Sichuan wontons, har gau, laksa, and vegan kimchi.
148,000 Instagram followers, 143,000 YouTube subscribers, and 260,000 TikTok followers later, Emma is writing a cookbook to punctuate her move to Hong Kong and provide a service to home cooks exploring Chinese cuisine.
Titled “Easy Chinese Food Anyone Can Make,” Emma is releasing her 90-recipe-strong cookbook in mid-July. To her, it is an ode to her family, her father’s cooking, and her ancestry.
“My dad is an amazing cook, my grandmother as well. Since I was young, I would spend loads of time in the kitchen watching my dad cook. In a Chinese family, food is central. We were already exposed to a lot of variety of food and eating lots of dishes.”
“When I had just moved back to Hong Kong, I had no idea what I was going to do. Beginning this cookbook two years ago, I felt that this was perfect timing to write this in Hong Kong about food in Hong Kong.”
In the UK, Emma became familiar with the typical “same questions asked over and over again” that people had about Chinese cooking. Her cookbook, she says, is “a space to answer these questions.”
The cookbook is broken down into chapters meeting the reader-cum-home cook where it is most comfortable at any time. One chapter, Easy Weekend Winners, shares dishes that require more effort than usual dinners, but are suitable for friends and family to share. Another is Whip Up on a Weeknight with recipes easier to make in the middle of the week for yourself or your partner.
The recipes are categorised in sections such as Takeaway at Home, Sides & Snacks to Share, Dumplings & Wontons, Sauces & Condiments, Noodles 5 Ways and more.
Signature dishes featured in the cookbook include Emma’s grandmother’s recipes for white-cut chicken with ginger and spring onion sauce, red braised pork belly, prawn wontons, Shanghainese spring onion pancake, and typhoon shelter prawns.
”I wanted to make the recipes really adaptable, because while I was teaching the cooking classes and working all my different food jobs, it was important to have substitutes for different things because who wants to go out, buy five different ingredients for a recipe, they’re gonna cook one time?”
“A commonality in a lot of the recipes is that if something is not to your liking, you don’t like mushrooms, have a certain ingredient, or even if you want to cook using an air fryer instead of in a wok, then you can definitely do that. Something that sets my book apart is that I give a lot of different method options.”
Emma notes that it is important to break down certain aspects of Chinese cuisine, which may seem confusing to Western audiences, for instance the difference between light and dark soy sauce, and other common Chinese seasonings and ingredients.
“Easy Chinese Food Anyone Can Make is a book that makes Chinese food really applicable and approachable to everyone.”
Now a teaching assistant in the food department at an international school in Hong Kong, Emma’s homecoming in late 2023 brought her closer to her root inspiration of her cookbook: her family’s cooking. It is her taste of real Chinese food.
“People always ask me, what are some of my favorite Chinese restaurants in Hong Kong? The thing is, I don’t have any. It is when my whole extended family, 25 of us, gather together at least once a month.
“Every time we get together we cook up different dishes.Each person will be in charge of something else. We don’t go out to eat.”
Pre-order Emma’s cookbook Easy Chinese Food Anyone Can Make today with international delivery.
