Ching-He Huang life and biography

Ching-He Huang is a Taiwanese-born British food writer and TV chef who has appeared in a variety of television cooking shows.

Glamorous young food entrepreneur Ching-He Huang is the face of Chinese Food Made Easy and Easy Chinese: San Francisco. Ching has starred in three popular TV series and is the author of five best-selling cookbooks. She has developed a range of Ching-branded Woks, tableware, Chinese cooking and preparation utensils marketed by Typhoon Housewares, as well as branded exotic mushrooms grown in the UK and available through Tesco.

Her major food influences stem from the traditional cooking styles of her farming-community grandparents, who lived in the countryside of southern Taiwan. Alongside their paddy fields and bamboo farms, they also cultivated an orangery, a sweet potato patch and mango trees. For Ching, weekends were a chance to eat meals and snacks which originated from age-old recipes, fresh from the soil.

At the age of five, Ching and her family immigrated to South Africa where she was exposed to an entirely different diet and climate. As the only Chinese children in their school, she and her older brother caused a stir with their packed lunches of fried rice and vegetables with dried meat powder or cucumber pickle with chili.

The biggest change was to come when she was 11 years old. Ching moved again, this time to London. From her early teens, with her parents involved in running their own businesses and her mother often abroad, Ching had to cook the family meals. She was taught the basic philosophy behind Chinese cuisine (the emphasis on balancing yin and yang through hot and cold ingredients), but then was left to improvise alone.

Ching's Top Recipes:

Fragrant Pork
Steamed Pork and Mushroom "Siu Mai" Dumplings
Yangzhou Fried Rice
Kung Pao Beef
Sweet and Sour Pork Sliders

As a self-taught cook, the experience was to be the inspiration behind launching her own food company. A TV presence seemed inevitable and, in 2005, Ching's Kitchen aired on UKTV Food. Since then Ching has made TV appearances on ITV's Saturday Cooks and Daily Cooks, UKTV's Market Kitchen and Channel Five's Cooking the Books. Ching's first cookbook, China Modern, was published in autumn 2006, and her second, Chinese Food Made Easy, accompanies the BBC TV series.

In 2008, she published a second recipe book to accompany a 6-part peak time television series Chinese Food Made Easy, commissioned and shown by BBC Two and BBC HD. Chinese Food Made Easy aired in June 2008 and was an instant success, attracting millions of viewers. Her book, also called Chinese Food Made Easy, was published alongside the series and was a number 1 bestseller for six weeks.

Ching's third book, Ching's Chinese Food in Minutes, was published on 3 September 2009.

Huang's three books published by Harper Collins, including her most recent work, have sold 250,000 copies in the U.K. and are now available in 20 to 25 countries around the world.

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