Rating: 
Summary: Serves a purpose, but not the best
Review: Unfortunately I was not as enraptured with this book as most of the other reviewers. I don't feel it would be terribly useful for a beginning Asian cook.
I also found some inaccurate or less familiar descriptions; for instance many recipes call for "thick soy," which in this book is called "dark soy, or superior soy" but a novice wouldn't know those distinctions.
Additionally the book only gives one or maybe two names for the same thing; if you're cooking something from another culture confusion may reign! For instance in this book belacan (spelled blacan in most other Asian cookbooks I own), which is a common Asian ingredient, is the only word used for dried shrimp paste -- it's also known as trasi (Indonesia), kapi (Thailand) and mam tom (Vietnam). In the grocery store I have bought a wonderful paste that is packaged only under the name "trasi." Using this book, who would know?
Among its weaknesses I find the dearth a pictures a detriment. Many shoppers (like me) are quite visual and look for colors or bottle shapes. It would be more helpful to have photos of some ingredients; for instance showing the difference between bean thread noodles and rice sticks, or what a jackfruit looks like.
I found the index difficult to use. Something might be referenced in the text but not found in the index. Drives me nuts.
However, there are some strengths to this book. It's a convenient size to bring to the store and gives a nice overview. It's also helpful for the novice to have brand recommendations, but I can safesly say, having shopped for ingredients in Minnesota and California (and in Australia), that not all the same brands are imported to everywhere and that what she recommends may not be in your market.
If you really want to get serious about Asian ingredients I suggest you check out three books: "Chinese Cooking, Step by Step techniques" by Yan Kit Martin (Random House). This book has photos and Chinese characters for many different ingredients. You can easily take it to the market. Charmaine Solomon's "The Complete Asian Cookbook" (Lansdowne) has a good glossary of ingredients in the back of the cookbook, but it's a big book to heft around (I think the new edition is paperback though). Lastly, if you can find it, "Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Food" (William Heinemann Australia) is well worth seeking out. It's the best of the bunch. Loads of ingredients listed alphabetically, pictures, a great index, some good recipes -- this weighty book has it all. Worth lugging to the market if you need help.
Rating:
Summary: Serves a purpose, but not the best
Review: Unfortunately I was not as enraptured with this book as most of the other reviewers. I don't feel it would be terribly useful for a beginning Asian cook.
I also found some inaccurate or less familiar descriptions; for instance many recipes call for "thick soy," which in this book is called "dark soy, or superior soy" but a novice wouldn't know those distinctions.
Additionally the book only gives one or maybe two names for the same thing; if you're cooking something from another culture confusion may reign! For instance in this book belacan (spelled blacan in most other Asian cookbooks I own), which is a common Asian ingredient, is the only word used for dried shrimp paste -- it's also known as trasi (Indonesia), kapi (Thailand) and mam tom (Vietnam). In the grocery store I have bought a wonderful paste that is packaged only under the name "trasi." Using this book, who would know?
Among its weaknesses I find the dearth a pictures a detriment. Many shoppers (like me) are quite visual and look for colors or bottle shapes. It would be more helpful to have photos of some ingredients; for instance showing the difference between bean thread noodles and rice sticks, or what a jackfruit looks like.
I found the index difficult to use. Something might be referenced in the text but not found in the index. Drives me nuts.
However, there are some strengths to this book. It's a convenient size to bring to the store and gives a nice overview. It's also helpful for the novice to have brand recommendations, but I can safesly say, having shopped for ingredients in Minnesota and California (and in Australia), that not all the same brands are imported to everywhere and that what she recommends may not be in your market.
If you really want to get serious about Asian ingredients I suggest you check out three books: "Chinese Cooking, Step by Step techniques" by Yan Kit Martin (Random House). This book has photos and Chinese characters for many different ingredients. You can easily take it to the market. Charmaine Solomon's "The Complete Asian Cookbook" (Lansdowne) has a good glossary of ingredients in the back of the cookbook, but it's a big book to heft around (I think the new edition is paperback though). Lastly, if you can find it, "Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Food" (William Heinemann Australia) is well worth seeking out. It's the best of the bunch. Loads of ingredients listed alphabetically, pictures, a great index, some good recipes -- this weighty book has it all. Worth lugging to the market if you need help.
Rating: 
Summary: A user friendly guide, up to a professional's standards.
Review: Why a book about Asian grocery stores? Because if you love eating and cooking Asian food you must buy Asian ingredients in an Asian grocery. To many people, entering an Asian grocery is a feared and anxiety-inducing experience. I wrote The Asian Grocery Store Demystified after living in Asia for 10 years and becoming as familiar with Asian foods as you are with the contents of your supermarket shelves. With my knowledge of Asian foods, recipes and cultures, this book guides you through the aisles of a typical Asian grocery and helps you build your knowledge and confidence. Once you gain access to the ingredients and understand what they are and how they are used, you are on the way to delicious and authentic Asian dishes. Do you have a Chinese, Thai, or Japanese cookbook filled with mouthwatering recipes and beautiful photos? And does every other ingredient have a little asterisk by it stating "available in Oriental markets or by mail order, page-''? Do you give up right there? Decide it's not worth the trouble finding the strange and exotic items necessary to make the recipe? With my book you will be able to guide yourself, find the best Thai curry paste, Vietnamese fish sauce Chinese dried mushrooms and Japanese buckwheat noodles. Can't tell the difference between mustard greens, bok choy and flowering cabbage? It's all clearly explained-with illustrations for visual reference in the vegetable chapter. Are you interested in the healthy aspects of Asian cuisine? Flip right to chapters 16 and 17 to learn about healing herbal teas, Chinese herbs and most importantly, how to incorporate healing herbs into your everyday cooking. It's as simple as tossing some wolfberries (think tart red raisins) into a pot of chicken soup or stir-fry to improve your vision and liver function. Or boost your immune system by simmering fish with ginger and astragalus root. Never heard of astragalus root? It and many more Chinese herbs are demystified in my book. Herbal soups are found in the recipe section. Is convenience more your cup of tea? Check out the section on instant pastes, soup stocks and frozen goods to whip up delicious Asian dishes in minutes. Just curious? You will want to cruise the snack, sweet and exotic goods aisles for things such as tamari flavored potato chips, purple yam candy and dried fish bladders. Whether you are looking for green tea, black sticky rice, Cambodian noodles, pickled fish, thousand year eggs, starfruit or dried lotus leaves, you will find it in this book-and at your local Asian grocery. Now you will know what it is and how to cook it! Make your next shopping trip a fascinating journey-and success with my book in your back pocket or purse.
Rating: 
Summary: Decent to Good Guide to Eastern Oriental Groceries
Review: `The Asian Grocery Store Demystified' by book designer and illustrator, Linda Bladholm is an exposition of Oriental ingredients with a very nice little twist which saves it from being a poor man's `Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients'. While Cost's classic book deals with the serious culinary details of a great many basic ingredients, Ms. Bladholm's book, as suggested by her title, is much more pointedly directed at the shopper's experience in your typical strip mall Oriental market.
The author adds appeal and charm to her book by opening it with a visit to her own local mom and pop run Oriental grocery store. The store in question was just a bit better organized and stocked than my own favorite Filipino run store in southern New Jersey, but all the familiar staples were there, if not in all the familiar places.
The device of providing a guided tour of an Asian market is reinforced by mentioning all the major brand names for staples such as rice, noodles, sauces, oils, and spice mixes, with opinions by the author of which may be the preferred brands. While I found a few misstatements, such as describing a gluten free flour as `general purpose' (general purpose flours by definition have 10% to 12% gluten producing proteins), and I missed some possible warnings against Texmati rice as a less than useful substitute for Basmati rice, I believe the advice and information in this book is a really great supplement to other books on Asian ingredients with a more scholarly bent.
By far the biggest weakness of the book is the difference in quality between the promise of `over 400 illustrations of ingredients' and the quality of those illustrations. The illustrations in the book are all small black and white line drawings easily fitting into an inch square area with lots of the pictures giving no sense of the kind of thing they are depicting. The little picture of ginger certainly looks like the ginger with which I am familiar, but the picture of the related galangal rhizome does little to assure me that I would be able to use that picture to pick it out from bins of produce labeled in Chinese characters. These poor illustrations give the lie to the claim that this is a `Take It With You' guide, in that it is dealing with a guide to items which may all be labeled in not only a foreign language, but in a script we are simply not used to interpreting. The very clever chapter headings of Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalong and Korean ideograms for food categories (with English translations) do nothing to help the situation.
Note that unlike many other books on Asian ingredients, this book has few recipes using these ingredients. This is not necessarily a weakness, as it means that almost all the space in the book is dedicated to the book's principle topic, the groceries. And, much of this space is dedicated to subjects which purely culinary books may not touch such as teas and medicinal herbs and spices. This is probably not the best book on these subjects, but treating these topics enhances the treatment of the book's primary metaphor, the Asian grocery store,, as they do, in fact, appear in Asian grocery stores. My most satisfying discovery was the appearance of classic frozen `fast foods' such as potstickers and Chinese dumplings. After our 25 pound sacks of rice, the primary reason for going to our favorite Asian market was to pick up a supply of frozen pork dumplings.
The book also does a nice job of featuring those things that are uniquely Chinese or Japanese. The short appendix on oriental cooking methods and utensils is not too helpful. These will be of little value if your Asian store has a good selection of cooking utensils. It does not, for example, give any clues about the various styles of woks or the various materials or what makes a good wok. This is especially important, as the criteria for a good wok are almost exactly the opposite of those for a good modern saute pan.
This book is great if you find yourself living within easy shopping distance of a good Oriental market, assuming that market covers all of east Asia and not, for example, just India and Pakistan. The book also useful if you plan to order lots of Asian groceries over the Internet, as the recommended brands gives one some assurance they are not buying sawdust. The book is less valuable for the culinary generalist, who has no special interest in Asian cuisine, especially in that the book includes no bibliography. For those readers, Bruce Cost's book mentioned above is far superior a source.
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