Beijing born · Master of cooking · UK professional chef
About Hui
I grew up in Beijing watching my grandmother cook. She never measured anything. A handful of this, a splash of that, heat judged by the sound of the oil. By the time I was old enough to stand at the hob, I already knew that Chinese cooking is not a set of recipes.
It is a way of reading food, adjusting as you go, and understanding why something works before you decide to change it.
From Beijing to the UK
That foundation stayed with me through a master of cooking degree in China, where I spent years studying technique properly: the science behind fermentation, the reason a wok needs to be genuinely hot before anything goes in, why some sauces need blending and others do not. I was not learning to cook. I was learning to understand what I already knew.
Moving to the UK
British home cooks are curious, enthusiastic, and often frustrated. They want to make the dishes they love from restaurants and takeaways, but the recipes they find are either vague about technique or call for ingredients that are impossible to source on a Wednesday evening in most UK towns.
I watched people give up on miso aubergine because they could not find miso paste, or produce a flat katsu sauce because nobody told them the flour had to be cooked off first. That gap is exactly what The Asian Larder is for.
What this site is
My name is Hui. I am a professional chef working in the UK, and this site is where I share what I know in plain, honest language, for a British home cook with a normal kitchen, a normal hob, and a supermarket within reach. Every recipe here is tested on standard UK equipment with ingredients you can actually find.
I cover Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Korean and Indian cooking, because those are the cuisines I know and the dishes UK home cooks ask about most. I also write about where to buy ingredients, which kit is worth buying and which is not, and what things actually taste like before you commit to a jar of something unfamiliar.
Beijing gave me my palate. My training gave me the technique. The UK gave me the question worth answering.
This is the answer.