Books for Cooks: New TV show, book build on Yan’s passion

“Books for Cooks: New TV show, book build on Yan’s passion” profiles Asian-American cook Martin Yan, a local San Francisco Bay Area resident.

“Now in his 30th year on television, Yan is still cooking – and spreading the message of honest food cooked fresh the Asian way. “I think it’s passion,” says Yan of a career that spans more than 2,000 episodes broadcast worldwide. “If you’re not passionate, if you don’t like what you do – you don’t even last for three years.” This year, that passion expresses itself in a new public television series, “Martin Yan’s China,” an exploration of the different schools of Chinese cooking that is part travelogue, part cooking instruction. The show, as well as the companion book Yan wrote, covers material that would have been impossible to introduce to Americans when Yan launched his television career. At the time, soy sauce was exotic and a wok was a funny-shaped frying pan you had to look hard to find.”

Yan is most known for his television series, “Yan Can Cook” – with the sort of cheesy tag line playing on his name – “If Yan can cook, so can you.” Personally, I think Ming Tsai represents a more modern approach and mainstream image to cooking shows (Tsai currently hosts PBS’s cooking show, Simply Ming and used to be on the Food Network’s East Meets West with Ming Tsai).