The following are the few items that I use repeatedly when cooking Asian food. I assume that you have measuring cups and spoons, mixing bowls, a colander, salad spinner, and the like.
I have a separate coffee grinder that I use exclusively for grinding spices such as fresh five-spice powder, garam masala, and other spice blends, peppercorns, and roasted spices. The flavor of these spices when freshly ground is so sharp and alive that, to my mind, doing it yourself is indispensible. Wet ingredients are best handled in a mortar with a pestle or food processor—they will break a coffee grinder (I have broken several). Use a mortar and pestle for dry spices as well—most people in Asia do—but doing so requires some finesse and practice. A grinder costs less than twenty dollars, so it’s a small, worthwhile investment. Braun and Krupps are good brands.
I can’t say enough good things about deep-fryers. I bought one a few years ago and now I wonder how I managed without it for all those years. They confine the mess, the oil can be reused, and the temperature is always just right. I paid about twenty dollars for mine and use it for French fries, chicken wings, tofu, spring rolls, and fish cakes.
A small food processor is a necessity for the home cook. They are great for chopping peanuts, making spice pastes and pesto, grating carrots, mincing fish for fish cakes, or making your own ground pork. The 1-quart models don’t take up much counter space and are powerful enough to do a good job.
If you are lucky enough to have outdoor space, you should own a grill. I use a Weber kettle grill with charcoal, but anything from a tiny hibachi to a large gas-fired grill will do.
I also love grilling indoors in a grill pan. Even though I have an outdoor grill, I prefer to use the grill pan for certain jobs. It is great for vegetables like asparagus, sliced eggplant, and sweet potatoes that are difficult to do on the outdoor grill, and for fish fillets, lean meats, and boneless chicken breasts. Fatty meat produces too much grease and smoke for a grill pan, and chicken with the bone is too thick to cook properly. I prefer the anodized aluminum nonstick ones to cast-iron ones because they are much lighter and food doesn’t stick as much. They come in round and square shapes—the difference is a matter of personal preference.
A wire grilling basket for an outdoor grill simplifies a cook’s life, especially for turning fish and seafood without sticking, and vegetables are not lost to the fire.
Lemon and lime juice are used frequently in Asian cooking. Any juicer will do—a simple plastic or glass juicer, the wooden handheld variety that you turn inside the fruit, or a fancy electric one. I just use my hands: plunge four clean fingers into a halved fruit over a bowl and work them around until all the juice is out. Be sure to remove any stray seeds.
If I had only one knife in the kitchen, it would be a six-inch chef’s knife. It is totally all-purpose. You can cut up a whole chicken, julienne vegetables, slice onions, mince ginger and garlic, cut tomatoes, thinly slice meat—do almost anything. Beyond this jack-of-all-trades, it is nice to have a serrated knife, a paring knife, a cleaver, and maybe a carving knife. The chef’s knife could do the job of all those knives except the cleaver. If you do a lot of chopping through the bone, get a cleaver, which makes the otherwise messy task of hacking up a cooked duck or chicken, or cutting spareribs into smaller pieces, the work of a moment.
You must keep your knives sharp. A sharpening stone is inexpensive. I wet it and run the edge of the blade over it on both sides on almost a daily basis. I have to do this because I just throw my knives in the drawer. A wooden block will help knives keep their edge so that you can go longer between sharpenings.
To combine dry spices with wet ingredients—peppercorns with cilantro root, garlic with salt, or lime segments with sugar—as is often done in Asian cooking, a mortar and pestle is the best choice. In Asia, a mortar or grinding stone is indispensible. A granite mortar and pestle is the easiest to use but also the most expensive. If not granite, purchase a marble or porcelain one. The trick is to develop your own style while trying to maintain a pounding-while-grinding action, yet not allowing ingredients to escape from the bowl.
A 3-quart chef’s pan or sauté pan is essential. Use it instead of a wok. Because of the extreme slope of their sides, woks require higher temperatures than the average home stovetop can generate. I use my 3-quart chef’s pan for most all stir-frying, stewing, sauce making, and braising. Substitute a 12-inch frying pan. For frying a whole fish or for a large stir-fry with a lot of noodles, a 5-quart sauté pan is also useful. You also should have a big stock pot for cooking noodles. The more room noodles have in a pot, the happier they are.
Rice cookers take the mystery out of cooking rice: it comes out perfect every time. The best ones are the electric, Japanese-made, vacuum-type cooker and warmer. They cost a hundred dollars and up, which is a lot, but they last a long time and are very convenient. I got mine while I was living in Japan in 1986, and it is still going strong. Put in as much rice as you want, then add water so that the water is one knuckle level higher than the rice. Close it up, turn it on, and wait for the light that tells you the rice is done. The cooker also keeps the rice warm after it is done, so you needn’t time it perfectly with the rest of the meal. Rice cookers are designed for Japanese families, who eat rice at every meal. They simply make one large batch of rice in the morning, and the cooker keeps it warm and ready all day. I recommend the five- or ten-cup models.
If you don’t want to spring for the expensive type of cooker I recommend, don’t buy one of the other cheaper ones. You’re better off just using a saucepan with a tight lid and following the one knuckle rule explained above.
I recommend having a long and a short tongs: the short for combining salads and noodles, and the long for grilling and cooking big pots of noodles. A set of wooden cooking tools is also indispensable.