Newsletter: 🌱 Vegan Hong Kong cooking + 25 years of bread machine brilliance 🍞

🌱 Vegan Hong Kong cooking + 25 years of bread machine brilliance 🍞

🍞Explore baking this summer & save 25% on ckbk gift subscriptions!🍰

Take a seat at The Vibrant Hong Kong Table

‘While The Vibrant Hong Kong Table is my love letter to the city’s culinary heritage, it is also an opportunity to create longevity for these nostalgic dishes with plant-based cooking. What we eat is continuously evolving. We certainly aren’t eating the exact same dishes our ancestors did; adaptations have been made as a result of migration, accessibility, and sustainability. This does not detract from the cultural significance and comfort of these foods. The future of food must be plant-strong in order to sustainably feed a growing global population.’ Christine Wong

We are delighted to bring you Christine Wong’s recently published book The Vibrant Hong Kong Table: 88 Iconic Vegan Recipes From Dim Sum To Late-Night Snacks—a flavor-packed collection of dishes that pay homage to the culinary traditions of the chef’s city of origin, updated for a plant-based diet.

Brooklyn-based Christine, a cook, and certified health coach, with a focus environmental sustainability, is first generation Chinese American. Her James Beard Award shortlisted book seeks to celebrate her culinary heritage, while translating it to align with her vegan health-forward cooking style.

The first section of the book runs through store cupboard items and market produce which may be unfamiliar to readers, and introduces key techniques.

Recipes are very well explained, with additional ingredient tips and anecdotes, and amount to a highly tempting invitation to get cooking!

Try Faux Fin Soup, for a plant-based way to sample a classic dish. Follow with Lettuce Wraps, or Grandma’s Hong Kong Curry. Sweet dishes include this Mango Pudding, and the hugely popular Lava Custard Buns.

Find all 98 recipes from The Vibrant Hong Kong Table

Pictured above: Longevity Zoodles (Zucchini Noodles) from Vibrant Hong Kong Table by Christine Wong

Happy 25th anniversary to
The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook

‘I have found that bread machine baking is a type of baking unto itself. When you bake with a machine, the technical part of the process is taken out of your hands, which may cause experienced bakers to be concerned about the quality of the loaf that will be produced. But I found, once I began to allow bread machine baking to stand on its own merits and ceased comparing the process to making bread by hand, that the bread machine gave me the freedom to endlessly create and improvise on a few fundamentals.

I began to really enjoy the results, too—the wonderful bread! The loaves are different, perhaps, than handmade loaves, but they are beautiful and delicious in their own right. And so, once you’ve armed yourself with a bit of knowledge, some fresh ingredients, and your beloved machine, I hope you, too, will approach this wonderful new realm of baking with an open mind.’ Beth Hensperger

Twenty-five years ago, James Beard Award winning cookbook author Beth Hensperger published The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook: A Master Baker’s 300 Favorite Recipes for Perfect-Every-Time-Bread from Every Kind of Machine. This best-selling, comprehensive, ever-popular book remains a go-to book on the subject—showing the wide range of things you can do with a bread machine, and containing all the recipes you could need.

The book’s front section offers ample background to help you get ready to bake, from Taking Stock of Your Machine, to thorough guidance on ingredients, the different stages of the baking process, and that all important trouble-shooting—What Can Go Wrong and How to Fix It. Recipes include everything from English Muffins to Almond-Filled Croissants, via Sprouted Wheat Berry Bread, Venetian Panettone, and everything in between.

Find all 300 recipes in The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook

Go go Gadget!

Whether you love a kitchen gadget, or just love a perfectly tender braised lamb shank or a great loaf of bread, modern kitchen appliances have a great deal to offer, revolutionising the time it takes to braise or bake, managing multi-step processes, ensuring constant cooking temperatures, and generally making things easier for us.

We have a whole Gadget Bookshelf lined up and ready to help you make the most of your pressure cooker and air fryer, your bread machine and instant pot, your sous vide, and your kamado grill. Explore technical tips and tricks, then dive into hundreds of recipes and put that culinary know-how to tasty use.

Ingredient focus: sweetcorn

Sweetcorn is a variety of maize (corn) with a particularly tender kernel and high sugar content, making it very good to eat straight from the cob. Corn is an important cereal crop for many populations, originating in Central and Southern America. It was a highly nourishing element of ancient American Indian Aztec and Mayan diets thanks to their adoption of the nixtamalization process—a form of treatment with alkalis that brings out amino acids and greatly improves the protein content of the grain

Unfortunately other global populations that imported corn from the Americas failed to adopt this process and so their corn was much less nourishing.

There are many ways to cook and eat sweetcorn, from the simplicity of corn-on-the-cob with nothing but a knob of melting butter, to currently fashionable corn ribs—try some Lip-Smacking Corn Ribs with Green Chilli Mayo. Take a look at these 12 Ways with Sweetcorn—find Creamy Sweetcorn Chowder, Halloumi & Sweetcorn Fritters, and more.

6 of the best rice pudding recipes

There are few things more comforting than rice pudding—it holds childhood memories for many of us, whether you are in England, India, or beyond. It is National Rice Pudding Day on August 9, so here are six gorgeous versions of this hug-in-a-bowl favorite.