Down the Noodle Rabbit Hole: A Cookbook Update
Welcome to issue #014 of the 🔒 Cookbook Confidential 🔒, a private newsletter with recipes, guides, and drafts we’re developing for the book.
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Hi all! It’s been a few months since we’ve shared anything on the internet and we’ve gotten questions about where we’ve been.
(Someone even tried spreading a rumor in our YouTube comments about my dad’s health — he’s thriving. He still goes on long walks, loves to garden, is helping me write our cookbook, and loves being a granddad to 5 kids!)
As you might know, we are writing a cookbook. This is by far the largest undertaking I’ve ever attempted in my career. As I normally do, I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to make it approachable, accurate, authoritative, and most importantly something that honors my parents and our Cantonese heritage.
I haven’t been posting content because I have been overwhelmed with meeting our book deadline and making the best book possible (and raise 3 young children at the same time.)
Rather than trying to do a mediocre job at multiple things, I figured it’d be better to just write a really good book and be a really great parent.
I really apologize for the radio silence. I promise we will be back to our regular programming soon!
In the meantime, here are some cookbook drafts from our chapter on noodles. I am becoming really proud of the work we’re creating and I am so excited to continue to evolve and push the book forward.
I’m organizing most of the book around all of the major ingredients in Cantonese cuisine — how to buy them, how to store them, what to cook with them, and the recipes you can create each one.
Noodles aren’t as straightforward as other ingredients, since there are so many types of noodles, confusing names, and a bunch of different types of dishes.
I’ve been miles deep into a rabbit hole on noodles, parading down grocery store aisles, buying research papers on wheat composition, downloading noodle manufacturer product lists, peppering my parents with random phone calls when I have questions.
Through it all, I feel like I am producing guides and refining recipes that will hopefully help our current generations and future ones continue cooking the noodle dishes we know and love.
The following 16 pages are drafts that haven’t gone through the final rounds of editorial scrutiny, but I’d love to know what you think about the general direction of these ingredient cheatsheets and recipes!
