Celebrate AAPI Month with Harvard Common Press! 

The month of May is both Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and National Barbecue Month. To celebrate both in your kitchen (and on your grills), check out these two Asian-fusion BBQ cookbooks.

​Asian Smoke: Thai and Southeast Asian Barbecue from the Curry Boys

By Andrew Ho, Andrew Samia, and Sean Wen

Make your barbecue more exciting, colorful, flavorful, and adventuresome than you ever imagined possible by mastering the amazing smoke-kissed recipes in Asian Smoke.

Who would have guessed that an unassuming mid-size pink stucco restaurant in San Antonio, Texas, would become one of the most celebrated citadels of barbecue in the US, and even in the world, less than five years after it first opened its doors? Yet that is what has happened to Curry Boys BBQ, the brainchild of Andrew Ho, Andrew Samia, and Sean Wen--the Curry Boys--who, by the by, now have two James Beard Best Chef nominations to their names, alongside dozens of other accolades from leading barbecue experts.

Ho, Samia, and Wen use traditional Texas-style barbecue and smoking techniques, and even traditional cuts like brisket and ribs, but they infuse everything with the deeply soulful aromas and flavors of Thai cooking (mostly), and of other Southeast Asian and pan-Asian cuisines (to a lesser extent). The flat-out delectable results draw long lines of fans and spectacular reviews on Yelp and in the food media. In this, their first book, they reveal their secrets for home cooks.

​Chinese-American Barbecue: Big-Flavor Asian BBQ from the Smoke Queen

By Winnie Yee, foreword by Jet Tila

Take your barbecue cooking into flavorful new territory with more than 100 Chinese dishes that are cooked, authentic barbecue-style, low and slow over smoking wood embers.

Open the pages of Chinese-American Barbecue and you will discover a broader world of flavors than you have encountered in your town's traditional barbecue joints. Los Angeles's Winnie Yee, of Smoke Queen BBQ, is the most celebrated female pitmaster in the world, praised by the New York Times and dozens of other media outlets, and a leader of a new generation of barbecue chefs dedicated to incorporating global flavors into the barbecue repertoire.

This is an authoritative, colorful, photo-packed volume that will give you years of enjoyment and will deliciously expand your vision of what barbecue can be.