First off... "gourmet ingredients"

Gourmet Ingredients and You

Okay, let me start out by saying that the sad, sad truth is that "gourmet ingredients" or fancy ingredients, or the expensive stuff, are hit and miss.

Some really DO make a difference... sometimes. Sometimes they don't. I often think of them as "wastes of money." While quality of ingredients make a difference, it's often how you use/treat those ingredients.

Let me start out with one of my amusing favorites... Sea salt.

I used to buy sea salt a lot in the U.S. It does taste a tad different, and it can make a slight difference. However, the bigger difference seems to be the size of the salt crystals, not necessarily where it comes from.

Why do I say this?

I mentioned in previous posts, I'm from the Midwest, and that I'm currently in Japan. Virtually ALL of the salt that was around when I was a kid was mined. Virtually ALL of the salt that is at my local supermarket now is sea salt. Japan has traditionally used a lot of salt because... well... have you ever actually TASTED sea water? They're not kidding when they say "salt water". It tastes like liquid salt. There's plenty of salt around.

So what makes me chuckle is when the local store sells French sea salt. Why? It tastes the same. I used to buy French sea salt in the U.S. Sea salt is sea salt.

Anyway, as I was saying, the main thing here is... sea salt may taste a tad different -- because, in fact, it is less pure salt than most mined salt... and the impurities are different -- but the size of the crystals makes a bigger differences. Smaller crystals (typical "powdered" salt) diffuse more into whatever you're cooking. Bigger crystals don't and give "pockets" of flavor... they may also cause you to misjudge how much salt you're adding. I've overdone powdered salt and underdone big crystal salt.

The real trick to stuff like this is figuring out what qualities are different between different products. Salt depends on its impurities for extra flavor and crystal size for how well you taste that extra flavor.

Other ingredients are hit and miss.

Recently I read about how dark brown sugar and light brown sugar are very different. They are. Dark brown sugar has a stronger overall flavor, but can be a bigger pain to cook with because it's wetter. I'm SOL on this stuff in Japan -- they typically sell dark brown sugar as sugar candy blocks (no joke!) and light brown sugar is the preferred stuff for coffee. So I buy the latter for making my chocolate chip cookies. ACCORDINGLY, I up the amount of light brown sugar and lower the amount of white sugar when I make cookies... this makes the flavor better, and the light brown sugar isn't terribly wet, so it doesn't make your cookie dough too wet or sticky to switch out. (THAT is something you really have to watch for in baking!)

On the other hand, the big local crazy with "Okinawan brown sugar" is... um... yeah, it's tasty, it's brown sugar. I like the candy. It's Japanese brown sugar, so it's a big deal here. (It's not import, of course.) It's cane sugar, which by the way isn't common in Japan. (Most sugar is beet sugar.) For most purposes, as far as I can tell... it doesn't matter for white sugar, but brown sugar is better when it's cane sugar... but, well, oh well.

Japanese are also big into "local" products -- it'd thrill the foodies here. Most of the ingredients I buy are from the region I'm from, because it's a big growing region (and, added bonus, not irradiated). Flour, sugar, eggs, veggies, meats... well, okay, the latter is from the U.S. or Australia, because local beef and pork are VERY expensive and in high demand for export. (Ironic, eh?) I CAN tell you that Japanese beef is really good, but I grew up with good quality beef, and the biggest difference is Japanese beef is less tough and lower in the unhealthy fats. (It's less tough even though it's more marbled. Very interesting.)

Anyway, I'm rambling. I'll post more later.

Authentic versus "Mangled" Recipes

I can read English (duh), Chinese (simplified is easier than traditional, but either is okay), and Japanese. My husband can muddle through Korean but he doesn't know enough about cooking to be very helpful. When I don't know, I use a program called Perapera-kun. (http://perapera.wordpress.com). This popup helps me read pages.

What this means is that I am pretty good at sorting through "authentic" versus "mangled" recipes for northern Asian cuisine. When I mean "authentic", I mean where I know what the original ingredients were and how they're intended to be used -- what you actually get, for instance, at a Chinese restaurant in northern China when you order Gu Lao Rou (better known in America as Sweet and Sour Pork). "Mangled" recipes means they've been already altered for a different region and ingredient availability. I prefer to get "authentic" recipes and mangle them myself... especially if I know what the original flavor is. For example, I know what northern-Chinese style Sweet and Sour Pork is like, I used to live in northern China. (By the way, most Chinese restaurants in Kansas and Missouri serve authentic northern Chinese food.)

Chinese food in particular is easy for me to pick out. I read Chinese all the time. (If you can read Chinese, I highly recommend recipe searching on baidu.com. If you can't read Chinese, don't worry, there are authentic recipes out there in English. More and more all the time, actually!)

As far as Japanese food goes, currently I don't HAVE to mangle those, really, I am in Japan. When that changes, well, I have good ideas of where to start, so I'll post up those ideas for the rest of you.

Korean and Japanese food are similar enough and they like to trade enough food and ideas back and forth that it's very easy for me to find what I need to make Korean food here. However, I can tell you that Japanese "kimuchi" (as they like to say it) and Korean kimchee are not the same... although the Japanese themselves KNOW that, and they also import genuine kimchee. My husband doesn't like kimchee, so I only use it once in a while to make a few things... he actually like Japanese-style better. (He is less tolerant of heat in food than I am, spicy-heat or temp-heat.)

I'm also looking for information on things.


I'm looking for a good recipe for Pakistani-style haleem, by the way. I can only find really authentic recipes in Urdu, and I can't read Urdu. Plus, I need some good ideas of where to find the wheat grain in northern Japan. I can't seem to find unprocessed wheat.

In fact, I'm always on the lookout for more info on northern Indian and Pakistani food, because I love it, it's terribly expensive to buy, and I'd really like to nail how to cook it. (I have one chana masala recipe that I regard as passable when I make it, and that's it.)

Okay, that's all for now. Gotta go and do stuff.