Modern Asian Kitchen: Essential and Easy Recipes for Ramen, Dumplings, Dim Sum, Stir-Fries, Rice Bowls, Pho, Bibimbaps, and More

Modern Asian Kitchen is the definitive guide to the next generation of Asian cooking: casual, hip, street-food inspired, easy to shop for, quick to cook, big flavored, and just plain fun.

The New Asian Cooking is bolder and more assertive, less fussy and more casual. With these easy-to-shop-for, quick-to-cook recipes, you can try—and will fall in love with—this trending style right in your own kitchen.

Heaped on big plates, Sichuan beef and broccoli and Indian chicken tikka masala are timeless comfort foods, to be sure, but there’s a brand-new style of Asian cooking that’s giving them a run for their money. It’s more about grazing through small plates than sinking into one big one. It’s more about pan-Asian fusions—“third culture” foods, the cooking of the Asian diaspora—than about each culture’s oldest traditions. It’s more plant-forward than meat-centered. It’s irreverent and fun and incredibly delicious. And it’s all captured in Modern Asian Kitchen.

Kat Lieu—the blogger and online personality who presides over the Subtle Asian Baking corner of the enormously popular Subtle Asian Traits online community, and who is the author of Modern Asian Baking at Home—serves up more than 80 inventive recipes for:

  Vibrant vegetable dishes like Sichuan-style fish-fragrant eggplant and umami-packed braised shiitake mushrooms Quick noodle dishes for super-easy lunches Quick-fix matcha ramen bowls and simple miso soups Dim sum, with tricks and food hacks like rice-paper shrimp dumplings Street-food favorites like Taiwanese popcorn chicken in the air fryer Customizable bibimbap bowls for busy-weeknight dinners Southeast Asian favorites like cold-papaya salads, streaming hot phos, and spring rolls with surprising things inside and punchy chile-crisp coatings on the outside  

The recipes also include:

  Umami-Packed Spiral Cucumber Salad Sumptuous Siu Mai and Easy Dim Sum  Melty Cheesecake Bao  Tony’s Spicy Cumin Skewers Crispy Crackling Roast Pork Clay Pot Taiwanese Three-Cup Chicken Mapo Tofu and Veggies Pandan Tres Leches with a Kaya Drizzle 

Whether you are cooking a family-style feast of a dozen exciting dishes for the sharing table, or you just want a simple and hearty one-bowl meal at the end of a busy workday (or a quick meal when you work from home), you will find a lifetime of tasty ideas in the pages of Modern Asian Kitchen.

About the Author

Kat Lieu is the author of Modern Asian Baking at Home, winner of the 2023 Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Food Culture in the First Book category. She founded Subtle Asian Baking, a Facebook group that amassed over 10,000 members in its first month, in 2020. It is a satellite entity in the enormously popular Subtle Asian Traits universe, the destination of choice for millions of young and young-at-heart adults in the Asian diaspora worldwide—and in Asia itself—as well as for non-Asian consumers and fans of Asian cultures and cuisines. Beyond Facebook, Kat’s online portfolio encompasses TikTok, her personal blog, and Instagram. For her work on her Instagram account @subtleasian.baking, the International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) selected her as a finalist for their 2023 Digital Media Award. She lives with her family in the Seattle, Washington, area.