Tiffy Cooks

By Tiffy Chen
Cookbook/Ten Speed Press/Hardcover/272 pages/$44.60/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3xd1FeU)
5 stars

Not all cookbooks take three years of development and three generations of input to develop recipes, but these extra steps taken by Taiwanese-Canadian home chef Tiffy Chen have paid off.

Tiffy Cooks (2024) includes 88 recipes – chosen because the number is considered lucky in Chinese culture – which range from quick breakfast foods to bulk items that can be frozen for months. She also includes basics like perfecting rice on the stove or her trusty chilli oil, which she gifts to friends and family during the holidays.

She took the plunge in 2020, quitting her corporate job as a sales consultant to be a full-time food creator on TikTok and her blog, Tiffy Cooks. Since posting her first video on Sept 3, 2020, Chen has grown her audience to 3.3 million followers on TikTok and 1.8 million followers on Instagram.

She also launched Kai Dong, a line of cooking sauces and noodles, on Dec 6, 2023. The products, released in batches, are available on kaidongfoods.com.

Her videos, many of which feature Asian dishes and meals, offer a range of content from quick recipes to make in between work-from-home (WFH) meetings and recreating street food such as Taiwanese street corn and Japanese egg sandos.

“Food is our love language, and in these pages are 88 of my recipes that I hope you will use to express your own love,” Chen says in her cookbook.

Not having cooked a full family meal in over a year, this reviewer chooses to try out the easier recipes: Chen’s traditional Taiwanese noodles, garlic oil and crispy fried beans. The instructions are clear and easy to follow, and the ingredient list helpfully lists the amount needed in grams, which makes grocery shopping a smoother process.

A small but appreciated bonus is the ease with which the hardcover book lies open with its pages almost entirely flat. This is convenient for cooks who will not have to find paperweights to hold a page down or tilt their heads at weird angles to read recipes. It is also easy to flip between recipes.

Despite a few minor missteps – not finding the exact noodles, running out of oyster sauce and chopping up too many vegetables – I still manage to turn out a delicious and flavourful meal.

To quote Chen in each of her cooking videos: “Now, look at that.”

It took her three years to collect and fine-tune the recipes with her mother and grandmother for maximum flavour. The results speak for themselves, highlighting the best of Taiwanese dishes while making them easy to recreate at home.

Each section is accompanied by Chinese calligraphy written by Chen’s father.

Listed in English and Chinese in the table of contents, each recipe also has the added pinyin on its individual page. For more complicated recipes, Chen includes multiple pictures of what the meal should look like at each crucial step – a reassuring addition for nervous cooks.

The range of recipes also makes the cookbook accessible to home chefs of varying expertise. It serves as a good introduction to the kitchen for those who have done little more than boil water, while also offering challenging dishes like Taiwanese beef noodles for those who navigate the kitchen with ease.

Perhaps the most important part is that Chen’s cookbook makes being in the kitchen feel like fun.

If you like this, read: Plantasia by Pamelia Chia (2023, $54.90, Epigram Bookshop, go to str.sg/kFbp). Missing the range of vegetables in Asia after life in Australia, cook Pamelia Chia transforms one’s relationship with vegetables through 88 delicious and creative recipes from 25 cooks that focus on plants.