Who/what are your go-to sources for authentic recipes of regional cuisines?
Years ago I had a decently-curated set of bookmarks of sites where I'd found recipes for specific cuisines and I figured I could trust the source... by which I mean that if I'm looking up a Cajun recipe like a shrimp étouffée, I'm not going to just take the word of a random housewife in Wisconsin (no matter how good the SEO is on her blog... sorry Ashley) or even a home cook you can recognize is a huge foodie by the number of trips they've taken to Louisiana. I don't necessarily doubt their skill, but you undoubtedly get a better starting point for must-have ingredients, important techniques, and trustworthy brands from people who've grown up as a part of the culture the food comes from.
In any case, I lost that collection during the pandemic after dealing with one computer issue or another, and a few that I had committed to memory seem to have gone down. I'm trying to rebuild it now - any recommendations?
Here's some of what I have saved:
Chinese - Chef Wang
Guyanese - Alica at Alica's Pepperpot
Italian(-American) - Not Another Cooking Show
Jamaican - Feed and Teach
Japanese - Nami at Just One Cookbook
Korean - Maangchi the OG, or Seonkyoung Longest
Thai - I used to check ThaiTable but it looks like it's not around anymore?! At least it's archived pretty well
Trinidadian - Cooking With Ria and Foodie Nation
So, any suggestions? Feel free to recommend any specific cookbooks as well. I'm still looking for some resources for the huge cuisines like Mexican, Indian, Chinese... I remember I also found a great YouTube channel years ago with a Vietnamese auntie that may have had an actual cooking show in Vietnam, and I think it even had English subtitles, but now I can't find it for the life of me.
Chinese Cooking Demystified is the go-to English-language resource when it comes to Chinese cooking imo. There are other good ones, but they're probably the most consistently good and well-researched option out there -- they'll travel to the region where a dish is from and interview chefs at restaurants about their ingredients and technique before making their own recipe. They often do still offer suggestions for substitutions (as obviously sometimes there are ingredients that just aren't all that easy to get outside of China) but they're very clear about where the info they provide comes from and are genuinely educational. They've got a substack as well for written versions of their recipes.
Thank you so much for posting this link, that channel is great! I love Cantonese food and it is really difficult to find genuine spots where I live. I'm going to try to make some of the Cantonese dishes on that channel, I've been missing them for over several years!!
Hmm, I guess I should check them out further. I've watched a couple videos from them before and I got kind of a food lab impression, like they were trying to reverse-engineer dishes that they'd heard about rather than share their expertise with the world. Which is still cool, and it may have just been those specific dishes that I saw. I'll give it a whirl though, thanks for the rec.
My understanding is that they are often trying to present a version of the dish that makes educated decisions about which local variations to use or at least which to present as options, which may be the source of whatever vibe you're getting. But it's certainly far from just recipes they've heard about -- they tend to focus in spurts on recipes from the same region because their research process involves traveling to a city and both trying a lot of the local dishes and interviewing the chefs about them. This gives them a much stronger baseline to build their own take on a given dish off of.
And that's aside from their non-recipe content, which is almost always phenomenal. Tbqh I'd be singing the channel's praises even if the only thing I'd learned from them was to buy zhacai and eat it over rice as a lazy snack.
I don't have as big a list as you, but a few i return to:
Thanks for these! I have a soft spot for Manjula already, internet grandmas are the best.
I'm going to cheat and call cooking with science a type of authenticity region. That is to say, I'm not just going to trust that I need to boil an egg for 5 minutes to make it perfect, I'm going to ask an engineer who wrote a cookbook.
Kenji Lopez-Alt's
The Food Labchanged cooking for me. The eggs on the title page from this review give you a perfect indication of what you're in for.He also writes for the NYT, and was a longtime contributor to Serious Eats, who are another great reference for many recipies.
Yeah, Kenji's gotta pretty much be standard issue for any home cook by this point.
I'm glad you're already familiar. I'm often struck to find out what I think is common knowledge, being novel. So I don't want to shy away from sharing it just in case.
For Indian VahChef is respected by the folks at r/indianfood, though I find his measurements are kind of vague. His videos are more instructive and some are very funny (cf chicken toddy recipe)
I'm pretty fond of Made With Lau and Woks of Life for Cantonese.
Not sure how authentic she is but I like The Mediterranean Dish for Middle Eastern stuff.
And the already mentioned Maangchi is pretty great.
https://persianmama.com/ - Persian/iranian
https://www.cookingwithalia.com/ - Moroccan/tajine
https://www.archanaskitchen.com/ - Indian (many regions)
I’ll also second la pina, she’s a great source.
https://thaifoodmaster.com/ is fantastic but it’s behind a paywall so you gotta dig them outa the wayback machine
Looks good, thanks a lot!
For Indian, VahChef (esp south), Manjula's Kitchen, and Chef Ranveer Brar (more punjabi) --- pretty good. For more British-Indian stuff, Chetna is my fav. Her recipes are all really quick and good.
For Ecuadorian cuisine, I recommend the KWA YouTube channel. It is in Spanish but the recipes can be quite easy to follow. It's authentic and was given to me by an Ecuadorian friend when I wanted to make some of his amazing dishes.
Nice, this'll help me brush up on my Spanish too. Thanks!
Some of my favourites that I can recommend to start out with:
Ceviche is also quite popular in the coastal regions, but I'm not a big fan of it. There's also a bit of rivalry between Ecuador and Peru over whose one is better heh.
Oh yeah, I've watched stuff from this channel before! It's great. I don't remember too many exact recipes being revealed but it's awesome seeing dishes executed at the highest technical level along with explanations.
If you just want any recipe, sure. If you want good recipes, and possibly to develop some sensibilities about the target cuisine... that'd be a crapshoot. I know there are users here from various countries and cultures, and who speak multiple languages, so I'd think there's a decent chance of being steered in the right direction by posting.
For Thai, I like Thai Chef School. They don't shy away from esoteric ingredients, though.
Vietnamese, I've gotten restaurant-quality results from Viet World Kitchen. The phô broth is worth the labor.
Cooking With Lane is a good general resource for Thai, Vietnamese, and Laotian recipes, techniques, and ingredients.
China, Sichuan region - I'm just starting to explore China Sichuan Food and Yi's Sichuan Kitchen. Extensive libraries of recipes and techniques.
Kenji Lopez Alt's The Wok: Recipes and Techniques will change your kitchen and diet. I've gotten much more vegetarian and vegan quick cooking done with what I've learned from this book.
Moroccan - My Morrocan Food, Morrocan Kitchen Delights. Moroccan Kitchen Delights is very bloggy, but the recipes are sound.
Ethiopian: Brundo Spice Company has a good recipe library. Not exactly Ethiopian cuisine, but Mashal Teff has a large library of recipes that substitute gluten-free Ethiopian teff flour in baked goods and they're pretty tasty.
More when I've finished re-collating my bookmarks...
Awesome, I've never attempted anything Ethiopian or Moroccan so will def have to dig into these. Thanks!