So... a book. (Patreon)

We’re writing a book. Or at least, we’re going to try. 

We explored the possibility of going the normal publishing route with book proposals and so forth, and while we did make some progress, ultimately we felt that going that route would end up either (A) hurting the quality of the content that we put up on YouTube or (B) leaving us with a book that we wouldn’t be proud of.

So continuing on the ongoing trend of ‘Chris and Steph are apparently bad at making money', we’ve decided to be… weird. I’ve always had the story of how Andy Weir wrote The Martian in the back of my head, and it’s an approach that (1) I’ve always been interested in and (2) probably won’t work at all in the cooking space lol. But we’ll try something similar out anyways.

What we’ve decided to do is this: we’re going to write and release stuff here on Patreon as we finish it.  The book is going to be a look at forty flavor profiles throughout the country – each chapter will go into the flavor profile, give a bit of background, then give 2-4 recipes using that flavor combination. For those new to Chinese cooking, we also want the book to be a guide of sorts to Chinese supermarkets, so we’ll also include a long ‘master list’ of ingredients with descriptions on what they are, how to use them etc, together with information on what flavor profiles use them.

Once we finish everything, we’ll compile everything into a manuscript for a completed book and go around to publishers with that. If we can’t find a publisher, then we’ll just format it as an e-book and sell on Amazon or something. We’ve estimated that – without sacrificing quality on the YouTube front – this project will likely take us a bit over two years.

We’re actually really excited to go this route, because we think that this’ll make for the best book possible. As we write, you guys can ask questions, call us out if you think something’s wrong, test some of the recipes & give feedback, etc etc. 

Word of warning though – the chapters we release here probably won’t be the final order that we’ll have in the book. We’re just going to do the flavor profiles that we’re the most interested in at the time, then we’ll rearrange later.

Introduction will be out later today. Feedback is always welcome, just remember that it’s early stages :)