“A Very Chinese Cookbook” does not look like most of the output from the publishing arm of America’s Test Kitchen. For one thing, there’s that cheeky title — and even cheekier subtitle: “100 Recipes From China & Not China (But Still Really Chinese).” But more to the point, in addition to the characteristic red box with the ATK logo, right on the cover are photos and names of father-son duo Kevin Pang and Jeffrey Pang.
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The two co-host the ATK video series “Hunger Pangs,” which spun out of father Jeffrey’s own low-fi YouTube channel, which began as a way to document his family recipes for his son — and went viral. Now, Kevin, a prolific food journalist whose career includes stints at the Chicago Tribune and as editor of the Takeout website, is editorial director of digital at ATK. And this book with his father represents a merger of his wisecracking, personality-forward approach, his chemistry with his more soft-spoken dad, and ATK’s meticulous research and testing processes.
The book — ATK’s first devoted to Chinese cooking — proves you can teach and entertain in the same volume: A few pages after some photos showing how to shape and roll scallion pancakes is a delightful spread by Kevin on how to open up a fortune cookie and switch out the paper slip with a custom fortune (“You really should get that checked out,” one of Kevin’s says), all without breaking the cookie. The book also explains how cooking became the bridge that repaired a frayed relationship between immigrant father and hyphenate son.
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All in all, it’s one of the most charming works I’ve seen in years, and I already want to get a second copy, so I can leave one in the kitchen and one on my nightstand.
In a three-way Zoom conversation, I talked to the two authors about the combination of their family stories with ATK’s precision,, American misconceptions about Chinese cooking, and Chinese methods of cooking with vegetables and tofu. Edited excerpts follow.
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I’m curious about the process of meshing two factors: the ATK sense of exactitude, testing, repetitive testing and your personalities. Was there any tension?
Kevin: First of all, before I started at the company I did not know that on average, every recipe costs $11,000 to develop from start to finish.
I saw that mention in the book and my eyes almost popped out of my head!
Kevin: I know. And the one thing that we might have been slightly nervous about going into this is that a number of these recipes are straight from my parents — you know, the little tattered blue notebook that they brought over from Hong Kong. So when we had to translate that from a pinch of this, a little bit of this, cook until it’s done, to the specificity of a quarter of a teaspoon, what would get lost in translation? But there were examples where my parents said that the version of that dish that was tested and worked through by a 22-year-old summer intern was better than the version that they’ve been cooking for 30 years.
What are Americans’ biggest misconceptions about Chinese cooking?
Kevin: One is that it requires inaccessible ingredients. A lot of ATK’s earlier Chinese recipes were developed 15, 20 years ago, when you couldn’t just buy dark soy sauce anywhere. So a lot of recipes started off with molasses in place of dark soy. In 2024, you can buy something like dried flounder powder, which you only need a pinch of for our Hong Kong wonton recipe. You can get it on Amazon and it will be delivered to you in four hours. So that gave us permission to take existing recipes and improve upon them, using rock sugar and dark soy sauce, because the availability of ingredients is not a problem anymore.
What else?
Kevin: The biggest thing is that it’s a monolith. The Chinese food most Americans know of is Cantonese food, the food of southern China. Or really, it’s southern Chinese that over 100 years of tweaking for American tastes has become its own thing, Cantonese food once removed. But certainly in the major metropolitan areas you’re starting to see the diversity of what Chinese food can be. And that to me is really exciting because if you don’t like Cantonese food, or you don’t like Sichuan food because it’s too spicy for you, try Shanghainese food. It’s more of a sweeter, sour palate, and it’s got more seafood. Or if you don’t like that, try Taiwanese food. The monolith is still a misconception, but with each passing year I see that slowly fading away.
Jeffrey: This cookbook is very comprehensive. All of south, east, west of China — almost everything.
Kevin: It’s like a Costco free sample table.
Let me turn you toward vegetables and tofu. Can you talk about how Chinese cooking differs in its approach to them?
Jeffrey: We have so many, many ways to cook tofu. You know, you can deep-fry the tofu, stuff tofu, steam tofu, make tofu soup. Tofu has no taste. But for Cantonese, we cook a lot of tofu, and the best match with the tofu is an oyster sauce.
Kevin: With vegetables there are so many different possibilities, right? The way that you cut gai lan (Chinese broccoli) into batons versus steaming it whole creates a whole new texture and releases different flavors. The small, simple moves yield such different results. And certain vegetables, with our American westernized upbringing, we envision as one particular texture. Most people think of potatoes as mashed or crispy, but a very popular Chinese way of cooking potatoes is to do so just barely because we like the crunch. The texture is like jicama.
How did the Homestyle Tofu come to be in the book?
Kevin: It was developed by [ATK’s] Carmen Dongo, and I worked with her on it. The word homestyle is really curious because it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But essentially in Sichuan cooking it means that it’s got some savoriness, it’s got a little bit of heat, it’s got some sour notes. It’s a perfect introduction to Sichuan food because you can eat it without blowing your head off, it’s easy to execute, and I think it really illustrates the versatility of tofu. And it’s really colorful.
Texturally it’s interesting too. You get the crunch from the bell peppers and carrots, but also, the Chinese love us a squishy texture, and when you do that tofu right it’s got just that barest of crispness from the hot wok, but when you bite in there’s this succulence from the sauce the tofu absorbs. Oh, you get me going and I can talk about this for hours and hours and hours.