A table covered in Korean soups, side dishes and small brass bowls

What Asian cooking at home looks like

Rice, a few sauces, fast cooking

"Asian cooking" covers dozens of cuisines, so this guide sticks to three that home cooks most often start with: Thai, Japanese and Korean. They share a backbone of rice, soy sauce and toasted sesame, and they share a way of cooking. You prep everything before the heat goes on, because most dishes cook in minutes. A typical session is 30 to 60 minutes: start the rice, chop, mix a sauce, cook fast, taste, adjust. The real learning is the pantry. Once you know what fish sauce, miso or gochujang each brings, you stop following recipes word for word and start seasoning by taste.

Pick a direction: Thai, Japanese or Korean

Open a cuisine for its first recipe. Its button adds that cuisine's pantry to the kit, and you can add more than one.

Thai cookingBold and bright, balancing salty fish sauce, sugar, sour lime and chili heat in every dish. A jar of curry paste and a can of coconut milk make a weeknight curry with almost no skill.

Start here

Cook a red curry stir-fry with chicken this week: fry the paste, add the chicken and coconut milk, and finish with fish sauce and a little sugar.

Hot Thai Kitchen: Red Curry Stir Fry with Chicken

Japanese cookingClean and savory, with dashi (a quick stock) and miso doing most of the work. It rewards gentle technique more than heat, and miso soup with rice is a meal you can make in 10 minutes.

Start here

Make miso soup from a dashi packet this week, and serve it with a bowl of rice.

Just One Cookbook: Easy Miso Soup

Korean cookingSpicy, garlicky and generous. Gochujang (fermented chili paste) and gochugaru (chili flakes) season most dishes, and rice bowls with side dishes teach you to prep several small components at once.

Start here

Make bibimbap this week, starting with two or three vegetable toppings instead of the full spread.

Maangchi: Bibimbap

Your first week

A fried egg over rice with seasoned vegetables in a white bowl, seen from above — A fried egg over rice and vegetables

The first recipe

Maangchi: Egg rice (Gyeranbap) Crispy rice patty with a fried egg, soy sauce, sesame oil, sesame seeds, crushed roasted seaweed and a little cooking oil. Fresh item to buy: eggs.

What you can cook in your first month

Gyeranbap (egg rice)

A fried egg over crisped rice with soy sauce, sesame oil and roasted seaweed, the easiest proof that a few pantry bottles change everything.

Easy miso soup

A 10-minute soup from a dashi packet, miso, tofu and wakame that teaches the one rule of miso (never boil it).

Red curry stir-fry with chicken

A Thai weeknight dish that shows how curry paste, fish sauce and a little sugar balance each other.

Bibimbap

A Korean rice bowl of seasoned vegetables, an egg and gochujang, good practice at prepping several small components before you eat.

Skills to practice early

Cooking rice

Rinse it, measure the water, and let it rest 10 minutes after cooking. Rice is on the table at nearly every meal in all three cuisines.

Prepping before the heat

Have everything sliced, measured and next to the stove first. Stir-fries and curries move too fast to chop mid-cook.

Balancing flavor

Taste for salty, sweet, sour and heat, and fix whichever one is missing rather than adding more of everything.

Knowing your sauces

Smell and taste each new bottle on its own so you learn what it adds before it disappears into a dish.

Controlling heat

High heat for a quick sear, low heat for anything with miso or coconut milk, which turn grainy or bitter if boiled hard.

What trips beginners up

Expect your first dishes to taste flat or too salty. Seasoning by taste takes a few weeks, and recipes are written for someone else's brand of sauce.
Expect an unfamiliar pantry. Labels on imported jars can be confusing, so buy the item type a recipe names and check the ingredient list.
Expect some heat surprises: curry pastes and chili flakes vary a lot in strength from brand to brand.
Don't buy every sauce at once. Stock one direction's pantry, cook from it for a few weeks, then add the next.
Don't crowd the pan. Too much food at once steams instead of searing, so cook in batches.
Don't boil miso or simmer coconut milk at a hard boil. Add miso off the heat, and keep curries at a lively simmer.
Don't skip rinsing the rice. Unrinsed short-grain rice turns gummy.

A wooden bowl of miso soup with seaweed next to a pair of chopsticks — Miso soup beside a pair of chopsticks

Rice, storage and allergens

A rice cooker letting off steam on a sunlit table — A rice cooker letting off steam

Cooked rice can grow bacteria that survive reheating. Refrigerate leftovers within an hour or two, and eat them within a few days.
Opened gochujang, miso and curry paste keep for months in the fridge. Soy sauce, fish sauce and sesame oil keep best in a cool, dark cupboard, or in the fridge once opened if you cook slowly through them.
Many staples carry common allergens: soy sauce and miso contain soy (and soy sauce usually wheat), sesame oil and seeds are sesame, fish sauce is fish, and many Thai curry pastes contain shrimp paste. Read labels if you cook for anyone with allergies.
Cooking for someone gluten-free? Buy tamari labeled gluten-free instead of regular soy sauce, and check gochujang labels, since many contain wheat.

Where to learn

Pick one trusted cook per direction and work through their beginner recipes, since each one explains the pantry along the way. Maangchi covers Korean home cooking, Just One Cookbook covers Japanese, and Hot Thai Kitchen covers Thai. All three are free and show every step on video.

Free cooks to learn from

How the kit is put together

The base kit is exactly the pantry for gyeranbap, the first recipe in the steps above: rice, soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, roasted seaweed, sesame seeds and a high-heat cooking oil. Each bottle and bag lasts weeks, so the whole base kit costs about as much as a couple of takeout meals. A rice cooker is the one piece of gear worth adding, because you will cook rice several times a week. Each direction then adds its own small pantry of three or four items, and you only need the one you plan to cook first. Fresh ingredients (eggs, chicken, tofu, vegetables, herbs) come from the grocery store and are named in each recipe's note.

A market stall stacked with bottles of soy sauce and jars of chili paste — Soy sauce and chili paste on a market stall

Stock the pantry shelf

The first seven lines are the base kit. Each cuisine's lines join the kit when you add that cuisine. Clicking a card selects it in the kit, and clicking the selected card again takes that line out.

Short-grain white rice

Essential · Pantry staples

Sticky short-grain rice is the everyday rice of Japanese and Korean cooking and the base of the first recipe. It also holds together when you press it into a patty.

budget

Nishiki Medium Grain Rice, 80 Ounce

4.7(44.3K)

$5.72

Asian Cooking

What Asian cooking at home looks like

Pick a direction: Thai, Japanese or Korean

Your first week

Skills to practice early

What trips beginners up

Rice, storage and allergens

Where to learn

How the kit is put together

Stock the pantry shelf

Short-grain white rice

Naturally brewed soy sauce

Toasted sesame oil

Roasted seaweed sheets (gim)

Toasted sesame seeds

Neutral high-heat cooking oil

Rice cooker

Thai jasmine rice

Fish sauce

Thai red curry paste

Coconut milk

Dashi packets

Miso paste

Dried wakame seaweed

Gochujang (Korean chili paste)

Gochugaru (Korean chili flakes)