The best Pacific Rim Cooking eBooks: Reddit reviews

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I highly suggest that you get a copy of Martin Cate's excellent book (tiki bible?) Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki. That will teach you everything you need to know.

But, almost all tiki cocktails are rum-based. There are a few with other spirits, but fairly few. (Get rid of that spiced rum - you won't need it, and it's generally awful.) You can get as many opinions on rum brands here as there are posters, but as an advanced beginner, I'll give you my list:

• An all-around rum - I like Plantation 5-Year
• A black rum - Gosling's Black Seal is solid
• An overproof rum - I prefer Plantation O.F.T.D.
• A column still rum - Cruzan is quite good
• A rhum agricole - Clement works well

What you're looking for is style of rum, and country of origin. Around here we find the terms, "light, dark, amber" to be pretty useless as there are dozens of different styles and tastes of rums within each of those.

Amazon has a free e-book called Bountiful Burmese Recipes ; I found it really helpful when trying to recreate what my Mom used to cook me when I was a child.

My favorite cookbook is Alvin Cailan’s Amboy cookbook before I found this cookbook I had bought countless Filipino cookbooks that were incredibly disappointing. This is the first one that taught me how to make almost every Filipino dish I wanted to learn and make it well. I do supplement it with the foodnatics YouTube channel because you get a better idea of the refinements/regional variations. Alvin brings the skill set and culinary knowledge of a classically trained chef and applies it to Filipino food. Foodnatics gives you so many great tasting variations to riff with. My one critique of Alvin’s cookbook is that he tends to go big with meat and potatoes at the expense of veggies. Like his Tortang Giniling is almost all meat no veggies, and in my opinion adding veggies and raisins makes this dish one of the best simple breakfasts you can get. But even in recipes you need to tweak he teaches you great ideas like he serves his with a ketchup Mayo sauce and serves like a stack of pancakes that you slice. If you are looking at adventuring into Filipino cuisine this is a great starting off point.