San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How a family’s food blog became a home for Chinese America
If you’ve ever resorted to Google to answer pressing questions about what to do with all the Sichuan peppercorns in your pantry, you’ve probably come across “The Woks of Life,” a prolific food blog run by Chinese American sisters Sarah and Kaitlin Leung and their parents, Judy and Bill Leung. The blog garners an enviable 7 million page views a month from home cooks seeking the family’s well-tested recipes, and its new cookbook, also called “The Woks of Life,” will likely expand the family’s reach even more.
As one among that 7 million, I don’t quite remember when I first came across the Leungs’ food blog, but their well-photographed and easy-to-follow guides to making chile crisp oil and Xian-style biang biang noodles have quickly become an indispensable resource for all my Chinese home cooking. Grounding the recipes are the honest perspectives of Kaitlin and Sarah, the Millennial children who started the blog to document the trial-and-error process of learning to cook (and streamline) the food they grew up eating.
The New Jersey family’s new cookbook mimics the blog’s wide culinary reach with 80 original recipes and 20 updates on previously published ones, including family recipes from the parents’ Cantonese and Shanghainese backgrounds, takes on contemporary mainland Chinese street food and Chinese American dishes like crab rangoon. For longtime fans, it’ll feel like a seamless transition from web to print, especially since the book’s colorful and appealing photos are primarily by Sarah Leung, who also shoots images for the blog.
It’s a practical book that you’ll actually want to cook from, with QR codes that link to bonus techniques; intelligent technical shortcuts; and recipes that range from blissfully easy char siu pork to Yunnan’s famous crossing the bridge noodles. Even if making your own XO sauce sounds daunting, you’ll find plenty of reasons to cook out of this book.
The book also presents a distinctly multigenerational view on what it means to be Chinese American, incorporating Judy’s experiences as a teenage immigrant from Shanghai, Bill’s time frying egg rolls at his parents’ restaurant in New Jersey, and the kids’ imperfect attempts to connect with their heritage through food.
In a recent conversation about the book, Sarah and Kaitlin talked about their flexible, everyman take on Chinese food. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Soleil Ho: There aren’t a ton of specifically Chinese American cookbooks out there, but there are a few — like the Mister Jiu’s cookbook, Kristina Cho’s “Mooncakes and Milk Bread” and now yours — that are working out what it means to fit into that niche. The descriptor of Chinese American is front-and-center in the subtitle of the book, too. What does “Chinese American” mean to you in terms of cuisine?
Sarah Leung: It definitely has evolved since, say, 20 years ago. I remember growing up and going to pretty authentic Shanghainese restaurants in Jersey strip malls as a kid to eat soup dumplings, but I would never think the kids at school would know what those were. But now, soup dumplings and biang biang noodles are in the American consciousness. There’s definitely been a widening of the picture of what Chinese food is in America. But also, Americanized Chinese is still a very specific cuisine that we are all familiar with here.
For me, as a Chinese American person, I feel I have all of these different entry points into my cuisine. I grew up going to my grandparents’
Chinese American restaurant as well as going to New York City’s Chinatown and experiencing that traditional, Cantonese food. We also experienced going back to China — the motherland — and experiencing what that food was. So there are all these different aspects of the Chinese American experience that we wanted to combine in this book. And that, I think, speaks to a wide swath of Americans as well, because Chinese food is so ingrained in American culture.
Kaitlin Leung: “Chinese American” is a unique phrase, and the choice to use it was deliberate. In our blog, we have four different perspectives, and they’re all unique takes on what Chinese Americans can look like. We definitely recognize that the definitions of what is Chinese and American are always evolving. And “traditional” Americanized Chinese food is included in that. I think a reason why people enjoy the blog is because we don’t discriminate against anything: We love General Tso’s chicken as much as the next person. So for us, it’s a phrase that encapsulates all those different perspectives.
Ho: How did the design of the book fit into that?
KL: I really wanted to make sure from the get-go that we were working with someone who would understand that the design was going to be incredibly tricky. First of all, there’s the Chinese aspect of it, in which it’s so easy to fall into visual stereotypes like the chopstick and the takeout container; just the same motifs that you see again and again. So that was actually a really big challenge. At the same time, it was important for the book to have the nostalgic sensibility of a family album. I think we were wary of it feeling too slick or too modernized — too watered down.
SL: We have never pigeonholed Chinese food into one particular avenue of it. We wanted that diversity to be represented in the book because one of my theories as to why “The Woks of Life” speaks to people is, like I said, that there are lots of different entry points. If the dishes that are most familiar to you are beef and broccoli and pork fried rice, we have that. If you’re looking for your grandmother’s congee recipe or something akin to a traditional moon cake, we have that too.
Ho: Do you ever feel the pressure to be more prescriptive as online “authorities” on Chinese food? Because that’s the thing that can be really hard, isn’t it? When you are lauded as an expert, you’re asked all the time, is this right? Is this wrong? Is this authentic?
SL: Yes! I have a lot of thoughts on this and actually wrote an essay on this that didn’t make it into the book. We’ve definitely encountered a lot of criticism on the blog over the years that’s like, oh, this isn’t authentic or you should have done it this way. I’m not against that: It’s great when people feel passionate about something and they want to share that passion. But we did feel that pressure in the beginning because we were like, oh, our version of this has to be the version.
Ironically, the thing that jolted us out of that mindset was going to China, living in China, working in China and eating in China because you realize how many different versions of one dish, even in the place of origin of that dish, there can be. Obviously, there are principles that Chinese chefs adhere to in certain ways. But, for example, red-braised pork belly has multitudes of versions. Some have certain aromatics, some don’t. Some use certain additions: I’ve heard of adding cherries to it, for example, to add sweetness and to add color. There’s just a
lot of creativity around those dishes and variety around each individual dish in the place of origin.
And it took the pressure off us a little bit because we realized there is no one-size-fits-all version of any dish: It’s just a matter of what tastes the best to us. And that’s why on our blog, we encourage experimentation among our readers.
KL: We’re almost trying to say, this is about taste memory first. The whole reason why Chinese American food even exists as a genre is because of people making do with what they have, right? You’re always improvising, and things adapt and change: The world changes and people change with it. So it’d be ridiculous for us to be like, ‘Oh, you don’t have this one ingredient so you can’t make the recipe.’ It’s more rewarding when everybody’s a little bit less prescriptive and you can just see where things go in the kitchen.
Ho: So what’s a good entry point in the book for someone who’s opening it up for the first time? What recipes would you recommend they start with?
SL: I love my pork and shrimp siu mai recipe. You make the filling in a KitchenAid stand mixer. It’s super easy actually putting together, and wrapping the dumplings is also really easy. And when you take your first bite, you’re like, this tastes like it came out of a restaurant! It’s a good confidence-boosting recipe because it’s really not that hard.
And then I think the other one would be my sister’s shortcut dan dan noodles. It involves basically mixing a sauce that can keep in the fridge for weeks so that basically you’re just whipping up the noodles and boiling some greens with your noodles and making a little relish, and then you’re just pouring your sauce and mixing it. You’re done.
KL: And then I would add our sesame-crusted tofu, which is emerging as a favorite among the editorial folks who’ve been working on the cookbook. Basically, you can warm up with the recipes by Sarah and me and then you progress to my parents’ more challenging recipes, like the Cantonese roasted duck!