Asian Recipes

⏱ Prep: 5 min 🔥Cook: 6–8 min 👤Serves: 2–4 🧄Sauce: Garlic butter Air fryer scallops come out with a golden sear on the outside and a buttery, tender center in about six minutes, no standing over a splattering pan, no guessing when to flip, no stress. The air fryer isn’t quite as ferociously hot as a cast iron pan on high, so you won’t get quite the same crust depth, but you get something that comes remarkably close with a fraction of the effort. The one thing that can’t change regardless of method: the scallops need to be absolutely, aggressively …

Learn more

⏱ Marinate: 30 min, overnight 🔥Fry: 20 min 👤Serves: 4 🌏Origin: Taiwan (Tainan) Taiwanese popcorn chicken, yan su ji, literally “salted crispy chicken” is the most iconic snack from Taiwan’s night markets, the dish that gets eaten out of paper bags with toothpicks while walking through the crowd. What makes it different from every other fried chicken is where the flavor lives: not in the coating, not in a dipping sauce, but in the marinade that penetrates the chicken before it ever gets near oil, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, Shaoxing wine and five spice working together for at least thirty …

Learn more

⏱ Cure: Overnight (24 hrs) 🔥Cook: 15 min 👤Serves: 4 🌏Origin: Philippines Filipino pork tocino is the dish at the center of tocilog, tocino, sinangag (garlic fried rice) and itlog (fried egg), one of the most beloved breakfast combinations in the Philippines, served morning to midnight in everything from roadside canteens to home kitchens. Thin slices of pork shoulder cured overnight in brown sugar, garlic, soy sauce and pineapple juice, then cooked in a pan until the water evaporates and the marinade caramelizes into a sticky, glossy glaze around every piece. Sweet, garlicky, tender at the center and lightly crisp …

Learn more

⏱ Prep: 10 min 🔥Cook: 15 min 👤Serves: 2–4 🌿Diet: Easily vegan Chinese eggplant in garlic soy glaze is one of those dishes that disappears off the table before anything else, eggplant seared until golden and silky, then tossed back into the pan with a sauce built on garlic, ginger, soy, oyster sauce and a touch of sugar that reduces to a glossy, sticky glaze coating every piece. Restaurant versions are often deep-fried and one-dimensional. This pan-fry method gives you the same silky texture with a fraction of the oil, and the glaze has actual depth because the aromatics go …

Learn more

⏱ Marinate: 30 min, 2 hrs 🔥Cook: 15 min 👤Serves: 4 🌶Heat: Mild-Medium Korean steak sandwich takes a bulgogi-style marinade, soy sauce, gochujang, sesame oil and grated apple and applies it to thinly sliced ribeye that gets seared in a screaming hot pan until it caramelizes at the edges, then rested, sliced thin against the grain and piled into a toasted brioche bun with gochujang mayo and quick-pickled cucumbers. It reads like a lot of things happening at once, but most of it is the marinade doing the work while you get on with something else. Bold, sweet, spicy, slightly …

Learn more

⏱ Prep: 20 min 🔥Cook: 15 min 👤Makes: 6–8 onigiri 🍱Best for: Lunchbox, snack Chicken onigiri are the Japanese rice balls that show up in every convenience store in Japan and every bento box made with care, triangles of sticky short-grain rice wrapped in a strip of nori, filled with a small pocket of something warm and savory inside. This version uses a teriyaki-glazed chicken filling: small pieces of marinated chicken cooked until the soy, mirin and sugar reduce to a glossy, clingy glaze. The shaping takes a few attempts before your hands know what they’re doing. The second batch …

Learn more

⏱ Prep: 20 min + 30 min rest 🔥Cook: 20 min 👤Makes: 4 pancakes 🌿Diet: Vegan Chinese scallion pancakes, cong you bing are nothing like a Western breakfast pancake. They’re made from dough, not batter, and the flaky layers that pull apart when you bite into one come from a simple lamination technique: roll the dough thin, brush it with an oil paste, scatter scallions, roll everything into a tight log, coil that log into a spiral, then flatten and fry. Four ingredients, one technique, and the kind of result that’s hard to believe didn’t come from a street cart. …

Learn more

⏱ Soak: 4–8 hrs 🔥Cook: 30 min 👤Serves: 4 🌿Diet: Vegan, gluten-free Thai mango sticky rice, khao niao mamuang is the dessert Thailand exports to every Thai restaurant menu in the world, and for good reason. Glutinous rice steamed until tender, immediately soaked in warm sweet coconut milk until it turns creamy and slightly glossy, served alongside slices of perfectly ripe mango with a salty coconut drizzle that ties the whole thing together. Most of the wait is the soaking, the rice needs several hours before it goes anywhere near a steamer but the active cooking is barely thirty minutes, …

Learn more

⏱ Prep: 15 min 🔥Cook: 15 min 👤Makes: 6–8 small pancakes 🌿Diet: Vegan, gluten-free Korean potato pancakes, gamja jeon, are made from nothing but grated potato, salt and oil, and they somehow come out with crispy golden edges and a center that’s soft and chewy in a way that Western potato pancakes never quite manage. There’s a saying in Korea that jeon tastes better when it rains, and after making these on enough grey afternoons to test the theory, the evidence is fairly convincing. The whole process takes about 30 minutes and the only ingredient you really need is a …

Learn more

⏱ Prep: 5 min 🔥Cook: 5 min 👤Serves:4 🌿 Diet: Vegan-friendly Garlic bok choy turns a vegetable people often aren’t sure what to do with into one of the easiest, most reliable sides in the entire kitchen. Bok choy stir-fried hot and fast with garlic, ginger, soy sauce and a finishing touch of sesame oil, ready before the rice even finishes steaming. Crisp stems, silky leaves, gone from the plate faster than almost anything else on the table. Ingredients Step by step The two things that matter most Dry the bok choy completely before it goes anywhere near hot oil, …

Learn more