Browse by how you cook
Geography is one way to find a dish. What people actually search for is different: something for dinner, something in 30 minutes, something vegetarian, something for a festival.
By meal
The course the dish plays in a meal. Most Asian home cooking is one main dish, one vegetable, one soup, and rice.
Main Dishes
Main dishes are the centre of an Asian meal — the braise, stir-fry or curry that everything else is built around.
Soups & Stocks
Asian soups divide into clear broths built on parboiled bones and long simmers, and thick soups thickened with starch or purée.
Side Dishes
Side dishes in Asian cooking are usually vegetables — stir-fried, blanched or pickled — plus the bowl of plain rice that anchors the meal.
Appetizers & Snacks
Asian appetisers and snacks are built for eating with the hands or with drinks: fried rolls, skewers, dumplings, and street-food bites.
Desserts & Sweets
Asian desserts rarely follow the Western pattern of flour, butter and sugar.
By diet
Restrictions that change which sauces and starches you can use — not just which ingredients you leave out.
Vegetarian
Vegetarian Asian cooking does not mean subtracting meat.
Gluten-Free
Gluten in Asian cooking hides in soy sauce, oyster sauce, hoisin and some rice vinegars.
By time
How long the dish actually takes, measured from a cold pan to a full table.
By occasion
Cooking tied to a season, a festival or a way of eating rather than to an ingredient.
Street Food
Vietnamese and Chinese street food is built for speed and one pair of hands: a single bowl, a single grill, a single wok.
Takeout at Home
Takeout-style Asian dishes depend on high heat, a sugary-salty sauce and a starch coating that crisps.
Lunar New Year
Lunar New Year cooking is built around dishes with lucky meanings: whole fish for surplus, dumplings for wealth, sticky rice cakes for progress.
By cooking method
The technique that decides the outcome, independent of which cuisine the dish comes from.
Steamed
Steaming is the gentlest Asian cooking method and the hardest to fake.
Braised
Braised Asian dishes cook protein low and slow in a flavoured liquid until collagen turns to gelatine.
Looking for a cuisine instead?
Not sure where to start?
Pick one collection that matches tonight, and cook the first recipe on the page.