Chinese & Asian Fusion Recipes for British Home Cooks
Two TV giants shaped how Britain cooks Chinese food at home — one in the 80s, one in the 2000s. We revisit their signature dishes, cook through the classics, and sort the timeless techniques from the ones that belong on a dusty VHS tape.
No steamer, no oven, one dodgy hob in a rented flat? You can still get buns, dumplings and greens on the table at the same time. Welcome to steam-stacking — the most underrated trick in Chinese home cooking.
Navratri calls for something sweet, and this year we're giving peda — India's answer to fudge — a chocolate-hazelnut makeover. Soft, cardamom-scented and ready in 30 minutes, they're the festival sweet British kitchens can actually pull off.
We boiled, steamed and fridge-chilled our way through nine bags of rice from British supermarkets, from bargain-bin long grain to posh jasmine, then judged them blind on fried rice, plain steamed bowls and congee. The results will save you both money and heartbreak.
Own-brand or imported? We gathered every miso paste we could find in British supermarkets, blind-tasted them in soup, marinades and a sticky roast glaze, then did the maths per serving. The results were more lopsided than we expected.
Chilli squid crisps next to the McCoys. Brown sugar boba kits by the custard creams. Britain's supermarkets have quietly gone full East Asian, and we spent a small fortune finding out what's actually worth your basket space.
Every recipe for Chinese food seems to start with a bottle you can't find in Tesco. We cooked the same stir-fry six times with six different swaps to find out which substitutes genuinely work — and which two will ruin your dinner.
Instant noodles at midnight don't have to be a compromise. We blind-tasted six packs from UK supermarkets, ranked them from tragic to triumphant, and worked out a five-minute upgrade formula using whatever's lurking in your fridge.
We microwaved chilled and frozen egg fried rice from Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, M&S, Aldi and Waitrose, then scored each one blind on smokiness, egg ratio and general sogginess. Was anything better than ten minutes and a hot wok at home? Barely. But there's a clear winner for lazy Fridays.
It's the most-ordered dish on Britain's Chinese takeaway menus, and the one home cooks botch most often. We broke down the double-fry, the sauce and the starch debate to get you genuinely close — with honest notes on where the takeaway still wins.
We spent a Saturday opening every door, drawer and jar in my grandmother's Manchester kitchen. What we found beats anything the supermarket 'Asian aisle' could sell you — and some of it expired in 2019.
Kimchi has conquered the supermarkets and sauerkraut is practically middle-class now, yet some of China's greatest fermented treasures remain a mystery to British shoppers. We open the lid on Tianjin vegetable, fermented bean curd and dried mustard greens — and show you how to slot them into your everyday cooking.
The £28 avocado brunch has met its match. From Manchester to London, we make the case for swapping flat whites for jasmine tea — and show you how to order har gow, cheung fun and egg tarts like you've been doing it for years.
Five meals, one day, forty quid — our timed route through Manchester's Chinatown shows how to dodge the queues and eat brilliantly from morning yum cha to midnight dessert. Full costs, timings and ordering tips for first-timers included.
Stop following noodle recipes and start improvising. Here's the simple ratio we use at Chin's Kitchen to turn Sunday roast leftovers, sad half cabbages and that jar of something into a proper wok dinner in fifteen minutes flat.
We lined up ten soy sauces from British supermarkets, added one traditionally brewed heavyweight for reference, and blind-tasted the lot — first straight, then in a plain egg fried rice. Here's what won, what flopped, and when the 89p bottle is honestly good enough.
Sweet and sour pork, egg fried rice and beef in black bean sauce — all from a single £23 Lidl shop. We scored every dish on taste, authenticity and price to find out where the budget really holds up and where it falls apart.
Every 25 December, thousands of British families skip the turkey and queue up for spring rolls instead. We look at how the Christmas Day Chinese became a national institution — and why it makes perfect sense.
While the pubs board up the windows and the gastropubs go dark, one institution keeps the fairy lights on every 25th December: the local Chinese. We speak to the owners working the big day and settle the eternal question of what actually belongs in a Christmas Eve/Day takeaway order.
The side of chips on every Chinese menu in Britain isn't a cop-out — it's a century of adaptation served in a polystyrene tray. We dig into how it got there and why we should stop apologising for it.