Ching-He Huang

Some cooks hand you a recipe. Ching-He Huang hands you a reflex: the moment the wok starts to shimmer, the moment the garlic hits the oil, the moment you toss and trust the heat to finish the job. For close to two decades she has been the friendliest possible guide to Chinese home cooking in Britain and America, a Taiwanese-born cook who took the mystique out of the takeaway menu and handed it back to anyone with a hob and twenty spare minutes.

Born in Tainan, raised partly in South Africa and then in London, Ching built a career that runs from a graduate catering business to eleven television series, eleven cookbooks and an MBE. Her food is fast, green, deeply seasoned and unusually generous with vegetables, and her teaching voice is the same on camera as it is on the page: warm, precise, and just a little impatient to get you cooking.

TL;DR

• Taiwanese-born British TV chef and cookery author, born in Tainan on 8 April 1978.
• Self-taught cook who read economics at Queen Mary, University of London, then founded the catering company Fuge Foods.
• Broke through with BBC Two’s Chinese Food Made Easy in 2008; the tie-in book was a number one bestseller for six weeks.
• Travelled China with Ken Hom for BBC Two’s Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure, which won Best Food Broadcast at the 2013 Guild of Food Writers Awards.
• Author of eleven cookbooks, from China Modern (2006) to Wok for Less (2024), with Gourmand awards for Stir Crazy and Wok On.
• Appointed MBE in 2020 for services to the culinary arts, and now teaches through her own online cookery school.

Ching-He Huang key facts

Ching-He Huang: career timeline

From a Tainan kitchen to a London wok

Tainan is a serious food city. It is the oldest settlement in Taiwan and the one Taiwanese people name first when the argument turns to who eats best: a place of danzai noodle stalls, milkfish congee for breakfast, coffin bread, shrimp rolls and night markets that hum until the small hours. Ching-He Huang was born there on 8 April 1978, and although she left young, the city never quite left her palate.

Her early years were unusually mobile. Much of her early childhood was spent in South Africa, and the family settled in London when she was eleven. Arriving as a child with little English, she found that food did the translating for her. The kitchen was where home still made sense, and where the flavours of southern Taiwan could be rebuilt from whatever a London supermarket happened to stock that week.

The grandparents’ table

The deepest influence came from her grandparents, farmers in southern Taiwan. Ching has said many times that her cooking grows straight out of the way they ate: vegetables picked that morning, nothing wasted, a little meat used for flavour rather than bulk, rice at the centre and everything else arranged around it. That is the quiet logic behind the recipes she is best known for. When she loads a stir fry with pak choi, choy sum, water spinach or gai lan, she is not chasing a wellness trend. She is cooking the way a farming family cooks.

It also explains her instinct for balance. A Ching menu tends to set hot against cool and crisp against soft: a fiery Sichuan cucumber salad next to a plainly steamed fish, or a rich braise cut through with something pickled. The vocabulary is Chinese and the pace is modern British weeknight, and the two turn out to fit together beautifully.

The economics graduate who chose the wok

Ching never trained in a professional brigade. She read economics at Queen Mary, part of the University of London, graduated with a first, and later studied at Bocconi Business School in Milan. On paper that is a finance career. In practice she went straight into food, launching a catering company called Fuge Foods that supplied large London businesses through the late 1990s and 2000s, with a healthy drinks line running alongside it.

That decade of feeding offices turned out to be the perfect apprenticeship for everything that followed. Catering at scale teaches speed, costing, consistency and the discipline of cooking for people who have twenty minutes and no patience for excuses. Every book she has written since carries those fingerprints: short ingredient lists, one pan, minutes rather than hours.

Chinese Food Made Easy

Television found her in 2006 with Ching’s Kitchen on UKTV Food, but the series that changed everything was Chinese Food Made Easy, a thirteen-part run for BBC Two in 2008. The premise was disarmingly simple. British households adored Chinese food and ordered it constantly, yet almost nobody cooked it at home. Ching set out to prove that the dishes people happily paid for on a Friday night were well within reach on a Tuesday.

It landed. The series drew millions of viewers, was licensed to the Cooking Channel in the United States and to broadcasters in New Zealand, Germany, Iceland, Poland, Australia and Belgium, and went out across the BBC lifestyle feeds in Asia. The accompanying book sat at number one for six weeks and took second place for Chinese cuisine at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in 2009. A follow-up, Ching’s Chinese Food in Minutes, arrived in 2009 and became a Five series the following year.

America took to her quickly. Easy Chinese: San Francisco debuted on the Cooking Channel in 2011 and was followed by New York and Los Angeles editions, a San Francisco New Year special and two runs of Restaurant Redemption. She became a familiar face on NBC’s Today show, cooked with Rachael Ray, and judged on Iron Chef America. In 2013 the Emmy voters noticed, nominating her for Best Culinary Host at the Daytime Emmy Awards.

Exploring China with Ken Hom

Ask Ching to name her favourite production and the answer comes back quickly: Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure, the 2012 BBC Two series in which she travelled the country with Ken Hom, the Chinese-American cook who had introduced Britain to the wok a generation earlier. The pairing worked because the two of them came at the same food from opposite directions, Hom with Cantonese authority and decades of teaching behind him, Ching with a younger and far more restless curiosity.

Together they ate their way across the country, filming street cooks, monastery kitchens, bakers in the far west and chilli merchants in Sichuan. The series won Best Food Broadcast at the 2013 Guild of Food Writers Awards and picked up a Gourmand award for the accompanying book. More than a decade later it is still the programme her fans quote back at her, and it gave her something television rarely offers a presenter: permission to be a student on camera.

Books, greens and the case for the wok

Eleven cookbooks in eighteen years is a steady drumbeat, and the titles trace a clear arc. China Modern (2006) was fusion-minded and ambitious. Chinese Food Made Easy (2008) and Ching’s Chinese Food in Minutes (2009) were about access. Ching’s Fast Food, published in the United States as Ching’s Everyday Easy Chinese, wove in childhood memories and Chinese kitchen lore. Then the emphasis shifted firmly towards health and plants.

Eat Clean: Wok Yourself to Health (2015) made the argument explicitly: the wok is one of the healthiest tools in any kitchen, because it cooks fast, needs very little oil and keeps vegetables bright. Stir Crazy (2017) and Wok On (2019) each won Best Chinese cuisine book in the UK at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, in 2018 and 2020 respectively. Asian Green (2021) went fully plant-based, gathering vegan recipes from across the continent. Wok for Less (2024) turned to budget cooking in thirty minutes or under, arriving at exactly the moment a lot of home cooks needed it.

A national honour

In the 2020 Birthday Honours, Ching-He Huang was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the culinary arts, in a list that also recognised Mary Berry and Ruth Rogers. It was an acknowledgement of something larger than a run of successful series: two decades of arguing, patiently and cheerfully, that Chinese cooking belongs in ordinary British kitchens rather than behind a takeaway counter.

Teaching the wok today

A good deal of her teaching now happens online. Her cookery school at chinghehuang.com breaks Chinese cooking down to its foundations, choosing and seasoning a wok, cleaver skills, the aromatics, the umami intensifiers and the sauce bases, then builds outward through more than sixty step-by-step video recipes plus a full vegan course. It is the closest thing available to standing next to her at the stove.

She has also kept a foot firmly in broadcast, returning regularly to the BBC’s Saturday Kitchen, ITV’s This Morning and Lorraine, and Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch, and she remains a fixture at food festivals and the Good Food Shows. Add a tableware range, an online recipe library and a long list of campaigns and causes, and the picture is of a cook who has never really stopped being an entrepreneur.

Awards and honours

Watch Ching-He Huang

See Ching-He in action in this video.

Signature dishes

Ching’s best-loved recipes are the ones people already order and secretly want to make better at home: kung po chicken with its numbing Sichuan pepper and roasted peanuts, sweet and sour pork built on real pineapple and rice vinegar rather than luminous syrup, chicken chow mein, salt and pepper squid, and a mapo tofu she keeps aggressively savoury. Her vegetable dishes are just as characteristic, particularly wok fried pak choi with garlic, spicy yellowbean water spinach and choy sum with goji berries. From her Taiwanese side come the dishes with the most personal weight: hong sao rou, the red-braised pork belly that scents a whole house, a Taiwanese-style seafood pancake, and Sichuan liang mian, the cold noodle salad she reaches for on hot days.

Cookbooks

Ching-He is the author of books including China Modern, Chinese Food Made Easy, Ching’s Chinese Food in Minutes, Ching’s Fast Food, Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure, Eat Clean: Wok Yourself to Health, Stir Crazy, Wok On, Asian Green, Wok for Less.

Personal life

Ching-He Huang lives in Surrey with her husband, the actor Jamie Cho. She is candid about having come to cooking as a home cook rather than through a professional kitchen, and treats that as an advantage: she learned in the same conditions her readers have, with a domestic hob, one wok and a weeknight deadline. Away from the stove she has lent her name to a long list of campaigns and charitable causes, and she remains a proud ambassador for Taiwanese and Chinese food culture wherever she is invited to speak.

Ching-He in context

Ching-He Huang is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Jet Tila and Edward Lee.

Follow Ching-He Huang

Ching-He Huang — official · Instagram

Ching-He Huang FAQ

Where is Ching-He Huang from?
She was born in Tainan in southern Taiwan on 8 April 1978, spent part of her early childhood in South Africa, and moved to London with her family at the age of eleven. She is a British citizen and lives in Surrey.

Is Ching-He Huang a trained chef?
She is self-taught. She read economics at Queen Mary, University of London, and studied at Bocconi Business School in Milan, then ran her own catering company before moving into television.

What is Ching-He Huang best known for?
BBC Two’s Chinese Food Made Easy (2008) and Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure (2012), the latter filmed with Ken Hom, along with eleven bestselling cookbooks on Chinese and Asian home cooking.

How many cookbooks has Ching-He Huang written?
Eleven, beginning with China Modern in 2006 and most recently Wok for Less in 2024. Stir Crazy and Wok On each won best Chinese cuisine book in the UK at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.

Does Ching-He Huang have an MBE?
Yes. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to the culinary arts.

Does Ching-He Huang run a restaurant?
No. Her work is in television, books and teaching, including her own online cookery school, rather than in running a restaurant kitchen.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, ChingHeHuang.com, Great British Chefs, The London Gazette, Guild of Food Writers, BigHospitality.