Liquid smoke - best since sliced bread

iquid smoke is possibly the greatest invention after sliced bread. As it is filtered a few times, it is supposed to be healthier than your plain old smoked products. Even more importantly, it lends that lovely extra flavour t your steaks and whatever you choose to bake in your oven creating a perfect illusion of something barbequed on charcoals. Use sparingly and towards the end of cooking to retain its intensity and richness.

Ras el-hanout: the head of the shop

ayer upon layer of ground spices get scooped up and mixed to zhush up tagines, the ubiquitous, and otherwise not that exciting, North African meat-and-veg stews. Apparently, there is no set recipe and each shop and housewife make their own mix. So, basically, it's just all spices you could get hold of, arranged aesthetically.

Moutarde à la figue et romarin: fig and rosemary mustard

renchies seem to know no limits to their gastronomic decadence. Just when you thought you knew of all their latest fads, there crops up something new again.

Unlike some other nations who attempt ill-conceived culinary innovations for all kinds of wrong reasons, Frenchies always get it right.

I discovered this unusual mustard last year but there still seems no mention of it in English anywhere. It has a delicate extra flavour and an intense light magenta colour but I still prefer the unripe black pepper one from the same producer.

Gros Sel de Guérande: the pure pelagic essence

reat food takes great ingredients. You can't expect to build a splendid palace using dung-bricks, can you?

Gros Sel de Guérande, is unrefined hand-raked sea salt from Brittany.Nothing added, nothing removed, it is pure essence of the ocean and all the extra minerals give my cooking that extra edge.

Hand-raked, by the way, does not mean that hapless Breton peasants rake it with their bare hands. In fact, it is women with their light touch, who are trusted to scratch off the upper layer of crystallised salt with rakes.

Oyster sauce: boost your flavours!

Once you start using it yu can't stop. Although it is a typically Asian cooking condiment I have discovered that imrpoves the taste of non-Asian food too. Classic oyster sauce supposed to be oyster flesh boiled in water until reduced to dropping consistency. If you want something like that, you will have to prepare it yourself as all commercial brands are, in fact, oyster-flavoured starch sauces.

At this point, I can't possibly afford boiling fresh oysters into drippy brown liquid to help stir-fried veggies taste better so I put up with supermarket varieties. They do bring in that somewhat nutty, savoury taste (umami) to the dish that nothing else can substitute.

Zaatar: Arab spice mix (زعت)

Za'atar (زعت) is the trademark Arab spice from the Middle East, unknown in North Africa. It is a mix of dried and powdered thyme, oregano, marjoram with toasted sesame seeds and salt. It is said to have been around since the times of Ancient Egypt, although to prove it with more certainty will take more evidence.

Like curry powder in India, each housewife has her own special recipe of za'atar. In Palestine, za'atar is a part of the national identity lore. That is why the 1977 Israeli legislation that declared za'atar herbs a protected species is used to harass Palestinians by banning them from gathering wild thyme or za'atar in the West Bank, and confiscating it at IDF checkpoints.

How to make mayonnaise

ayonnaise is easily Russia's national dressing. Although often derided as fatty and unhealthy, in Russia it outsells every other type of commercial condiment including ketchup: the Guinness Book of Records insists that the Russian city of Ekaterinburg is world's leader in mayonnaise consumption.
A Ekaterinburg-native friend of mine told me that when back in the 90s Russian factory workers tried to mess with the newly imported Italian mayonnaise-making machinery by using less expensive ingredients and more water, it would stop working. According to him, that's why Eketarinburgers have been enjoying properly manufactured mayo ever since.
It is somewhat ironic that the jarred variety with all the creepy chemical additives, very likely substandard eggs, inexplicably added sugar and excess of salt is so popular despite mayonnaise being one of the simplest and cheapest sauces to make at home. It takes just about 5 minutes to whip up a bowl of mayonnaise. Here how it goes:

1. Mix well one very fresh egg yolk (I buy biodynamic free-range organic eggs from Orchard eggs) with a tablespoonful Dijon mustard. Both need to be room temperature.
   
2. Add little by little one glass of your favourite vegetable oil while whisking vigorously making sure that all oil is incorporated in the mixture before adding any more. Only use up to 30% of olive oil as it tends to make your mayonnaise taste bitter.
   
3. Now for the flavouring. Mix one tablespoonful aceto balsamico bianco, some finely ground sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste, and whisk the mixture in. That said, I use Thai fish sauce instead of salt for the extra kick and add crushed garlic to make aioli. You can also add finely chopped estragon, anchovies, etc. - let your imagination run free!
   
4. In case your mayo comes out too thick, whisk in a tablespoonful of water.

Sambal manis: spicy Indonesian relish

ambal manis means "sweet sauce" in Bahasa Indonesia but such a simple name belies an amazing explosion of tastes.

Finely chopped chillies, onions, sugar, galangal and garlic are fried in vegetable oil to achieve a highly delectable balance of spiciness ad sweetness. Strictly speaking, sambal manis is a relish as it is a rather thick paste. It is much milder than its more famous cousin, sambal ulek, which is basically crushed chillies with some salt. S-s-spicy!

There is sometimes a confusion because another, very different condiment is called sambal ketchap manis. It is a mild soya sauce and tastes nothing like sambal manis.

I buy it ready made. The best one I found is from Koningsvogel of Rijswijk, Holland while the one by Conimex tastes quite vile.

Fish sauce: South East Asia's favourite condiment

cquired taste takes some exposure and experience. You need to have lived enough to appreciate decadence. There are precious few people who take to runny French cheeses, coffee or caviar as a kid. I remember how disgusted I was when I tried olives for the first time. A six-year-old would really rather have had a cake.

I was twenty when I got the first sniff of fish sauce but I did not yet have enough mileage. I was instantly turned off. The concept of just-one-notch-before-decay fragrance was too advanced for me. The fact that I just started treading the militant vegan path did not help either. It took me a few years before I learnt to appreciate nam pla's (that's what they call fish sauce in Thailand) flavour.

Fish sauce is made by mixing anchovy-like fish, salt and water and let nature take its course. The result is a clear brownish liquid with a pungent flavour. It has a wide coinage in mainland South East Asia and the Philippines as well as in parts of Southern China were it is referred to as "fish dew" (魚露). South and west of the Thai border it, however, suddenly loses popularity. Only ethnic Chinese use it in cooking there.

These days I can't imagine cooking without it. A bit of fish sauce improves nearly any savoury dish, even some European ones, but shush, don't tell anyone!

Fish sauce is known as nước mắm in Vietnam, aek jot (어장) in Korea, teuk trei in Cambodia, patis in the Philippines, nam pa in Laos.


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Thai language school and translation agency in Bangkok, Thailand offering Thai, Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian and Laotian (Lao, Isarn, Isaan) language courses.

Mirin: Japanese cooking rice wine (みりん)

ne late student night last century, in a Nagoya neighbourhood my mates and yours truly ran out of beer. Somebody suggested drinking mirin and, as intended, caused a massive brouhaha.

These days mirin (みりん), mildly alcoholic (14%) syrup is used exclusively for cooking. No one would think of drinking it. However, some 200 years ago, in Edo Period, mirin was a fancy booze. If you try it, you will understand why. For a cooking wine it tastes quite nice, rather like low-alcohol muscat. Mirin-based herbal liquors like toso (屠蘇) and yomeishu (養命酒) still have some currency in Japan but no one has yet thought of marketing them abroad as a novel Oriental drink.

As it has quite a particular flavour you can't just substitute it with white wine and sugar (although you can try!). Mirin is absolutely essential for cooking such Japanese classics as unagi-don or teriyaki sauce.

To avoid paying the alcohol tax on mirin sales, there are two close substitutes in the market: shio-mirin (塩みりん) with 1.5% added salt that supposedly makes it unquaffable and mirin-fu (みりん風調味料, on the picture above), which tastes the same but only contains 1% of alcohol. It may take quite in effort to buy real stuff, hon-mirin　(本みりん), abroad, but the substitutes are actually not that bad at all.

As thanks for reading this far, here I will reveal Japanese housewives' little secret: marinade of equal shares of mirin, sake and shoyu enhances the taste of white fish without interfering with its flavour. Just soak fish filets for half an hour and cook as usual.

Shrimp paste: kapi, belacan, terasi

hatever people can make out of what Nature gives us! Kapi shrimp paste represents a totally different approach to using seafood than crevettes mayonnaise. Here, weeny shrimp that otherwise would be too small to consume is fermented into a condiment. It has a solid homogeneous consistency and intense flavour.

It took me a while to get used to it. For someone brought up halfway between Moscow and Alaska, the heady smell of sun-rotten shrimp ground into paste was just too overpowering.

Time heals everything, even aversion to exotic condiments. These days I add a wee dram even to some dishes that are not supposed to contain it, like Korean jaeyook bokkeum. It works amazingly good.

I call this shrimp paste by its Thai name kapi because I first encountered it in Thailand. It is called the same way in Laotian and Khmer but its native range actually spans from Southern China to Indonesia. In Malaysia it is called belacan, in Indonesia - terasi. They make an intensely fragrant sauce out of it, sambal belacan or sambal terasi that tastes amazing with squid (sambal cumi-cumi). The same thing is called nam phrik kapi (น้ำพริกกะปิ) in Thailand and used as a dip.


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Thai language school and translation agency in Bangkok, Thailand offering Thai, Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian and Laotian (Lao, Isarn, Isaan) language courses.

Miso: Japanese soya bean paste (味噌)

n the olden days of self-isolation, Japan was a strictly Buddhist country. In culinary terms it meant that meat consumption was banned. For protein, the Japanese had to rely on fish and beans. When others would be content chewing on fried fish and boiled beans, the Japanese went to great lengths to diversify their diet. Beans alone come in a myriad of often unrecognisable, yet very delicious guises.

Miso is one of those. Essentially, it is salted bean paste fermented with Japan's official national micro-organism, Aspergillus oryzae, known in Japanese as kouji-kin (麴菌). The paste is also augmented with ground grain such as rice, barley, mullet or buckwheat. Fermentation makes beans more easily digestible and, in fact, even medicinal. Miso consumption is credited with a slew of health benefits starting from hypertension control to curing radiation sickness.

As it always goes with food in Japan, there are hundreds of regional varieties. They all can be divided into four big categories:

1. shiro-miso, which is of a blonder hue as in the top picture,
   
2. aka-miso, which is dark(er) brown,
3. kuro-miso is the darkest of them all,
4. hatcho-miso has the strongest flavour.

Most famous regional varieties include:

• Hatchou miso (八丁味噌) - Aichi Prefecture
• Nagoya miso (名古屋味噌) - Aichi Prefecture
  
• Sanshu miso (三州味噌), slightly bitterirsh miso widely used in kaiseki dishes - Nagoya Prefecture
  
• Kujo miso (郡上味噌), based on a mix of barley and beans - Gifu Prefecture
• Gozen miso (御膳味噌), red sweet-tasting miso with a high content of ground rice - Tokushima Prefecture
  
• Kinzanji miso (金山寺味噌, 径山寺味噌), the base paste is made from beans, rice barley and vegetables - Wakayama Prefecture
  
• Aijiro miso (相白味噌), blonde sweet-tasting miso - Shizuoka Prefecture
  
• Hokkaido miso (北海道味噌) - Hokkaido Prefecture
  
• Tsugaru miso (津軽味噌), spicy-tasting red miso - Aomori Prefecture
  
• Akita miso (秋田味噌) - Akita Prefecture
• Sendai miso (仙台味噌), spicy tasting miso with rice and with coarsely ground beans, can be consumed raw - Miyagi Prefecture
• Aizu miso (会津味噌) - Fukushima Prefecture
• Echigo miso( 越後味噌) - Niigata Prefecture
• Sado miso (佐渡味噌) - Niigata Prefecture
• Etchu miso (越中味噌), light miso with whole rice grains, aka "water miso" - Toyama Prefecture
  
• Kaga miso (加賀味噌) - Ishikawa Prefecture
• Seikyou miso (西京味噌) - Kyoto Prefecture
• Fuchu miso (府中味噌) - Hiroshima Prefecture
• Sanuki miso (讃岐味噌) - Kagawa Prefecture
• Shimabara miso (島原味噌), barley-based - Nagasaki Prefecture
• Satsuma miso (薩摩味噌), sweet-tasting barley-based miso - Kagoshima Prefecture
• Edo Amamiso (江戸甘味噌) - Tokyo Prefecture
• Shinshu Miso (信州味噌) - Nagano Prefecture
• Sakura Miso (桜味噌) - Osaka Prefecture
• Akadashi (赤だし) - Kyoto Prefecture - 豆・米調味味噌
• Sotetsu miso (蘇鉄味噌) or Nari miso (なり味噌), made from detoxified cycad fruit - Okinawa Prefecture and Amami Islands in Kagoshima Prefecture
  

Apart from its main role as the base of miso-shiru soup, miso is a very versatile condiment. One of the effects of fermentation is the increased content of amino acids that our taste buds perceive as savoury. This makes it a welcome ingredient in many dishes. It is used to pickle vegetables in the marinade called miso-zuke.

Other ways to use miso in cooking include:

• miso udon
• basting mix for dengaku, yakimochi and corn on the cob
• marinades
• misoyaki sauce

Tobanjan: hot bean sauce (辣豆瓣酱)

ot bean sauce" just does not cut it for me.  It sounds bland and unimaginative. Toubanjan is the name. It tastes just like its name: "Thud-bang-shhhaaa!!!" Your mouth stays widely gaping at this very open "a", while you are dashing around looking for some water to douse the fire.

I came across it in my student years in Japan and I call it by its Japanese name. However, this mighty sensual assault on your taste buds was invented in China's Southwest, Szechuan, as dou-ban-jiang (豆瓣酱).

There are two types of it: plain and spicy. I am no big fan of the plain version (it is just smelly and salty), but the spicy one la-dou-ban-jiang (辣豆瓣酱) is one of my favourite condiments. It is indispensable in mapo dofu (麻婆豆腐), the Szechuan numbingly hot toufu, mince and aubergine stew, as well as dandan noodles (擔擔麵). I also like to top steamed rice with it when I am going through a cook's block. It works superbly plain as dressing for avocado.

Korean gochujang looks and tastes somewhat similar to it but had a different flavour because in Korea they use ground sticky rice instead of beans and the fermenting process is different.

It's happened: I am a shoyu whore

oday I committed adultery. All my adult life I was a Kikkoman man. Kikkoman is one of world's most popular and definitely best marketed brand of shoyu, the Japanese soya sauce. You will hardly ever see me declaring my allegiance to brands but in this case I am not ashamed. Kikkoman delivers a superbly manufactured condiment. Its shoyu can be compared to a wine, as it is brewed and contains 0.5% alcohol. You can smell an unmistakeable whiff of alcohol from a freshly opened bottle. (The first character in the Japanese word shoyu (醤) signifies that it is a kind of alcohol.)

But today I went astray. I saw a Yamasa brand shoyu in Wine and Rice Shop on Brewer Street at almost half the price. The shop assistant kindly explained that in fact Yamasa brand has a better pedigree (由緒正しい) as it was established in 1645 as opposed to Kikkoman's 1917. A longer noble line at half the price, how could I resist that?

Yamasa's shoyu turned out to be good quality with a bit drier taste and less heady aroma. I am not sure that I will keep buying it because I think I do miss Kikkoman's delightfully rankish flavour.