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use shrimp stock (fumet de crevettes) as the base for bechamel and so should you, it makes the whole difference, giving the lowly mix of fried flour and cream whole dimensions of flavour and richness. - I love pink Greenland shrimp (they taste sweet and are not farmed) and keep all the peelings refrigerated until I am ready to cook this. Put whatever shrimp peelings you have in a large pan of cold water with some roughly chopped celery stalks, carrots, leeks and halved onions.
- Bring to a boil and allow to simmer for 40 minutes.
- Towards the end season with salt, bay leaf, allspice berries, nutmeg, cloves and black pepper. Allow to simmer a few more minutes.
- Set aside to chill and then refrigerate if you plan to use it later.
- If you are planning on making some bechamel immediately, keep it hot, as it is the roux that needs to be chilled.
Shrimp stock recipe
his Christmas season I won't blame if you think of goose fat looking at Nigella Lawson's voluptuous curves. After all, it is she who is credited with re-introduction of this traditional product to the British market.
Goose fat has a high burning temperature which means that you can fry you potatoes on a very high fire without acrid fumes smarting your eyes. And the results are spectacular. It is a sort of a known fact that quick cooking is best: compare succulent Thai vegetable stir-fries to multi-hour North European stews where you'd be pressed hard to recognise the original ingredients.
When I was a kid, goose fat was the best remedy for chapped lips - we go a lot of those when the red-tinted alcohol in thermometers - mercury would have already frozen! - used to hit -65 Celcius. It is a half-forgotten method now that we have all these fancy lip balms.
o escape the drudgery of job search last autumn, I would go walking around the parks. London's parks are gorgeous in autumn hues on a sunny day. Sunshine adds vigour and vitality to the leaves' colours, bizarrely glorifying what is essentially a state of decay and dying. Ranelagh Gardens, a hidden gem near Sloane Square, are my favourite.
I also like all the gifts of nature that come in the fall: pumpkins, chestnuts, game, all root veggies with their earthy flavours. I just went shopping yesterday and bought 3 bags of those. The colours, the sense of abundance somehow links in my brain with the human middle age, when wisdom (with some luck) finally triumphs.
don't always mind shortcuts in cooking. The traditional goulash recipe takes up to two hours of boiling down paprika into gravy. You can bypass that by using a ready-made gulyaskrém, paprika paste for goulash.
Hungarians don't expect foreigners to be interested in this product, so you can only get hold of it in Hungary, nor is there any information on the tubes in any language besides Hungarian. However, you only need to know two words: csípős (hot) and félédes (mild). My preference goes for the félédes version for making actual goulash or pörkölt - it does not overwhelm the rest of the stew's flavours. The csípős version is fab as a spicy spread for sandwiches, it has the kind of kick and favour quite unlike anything else spicy. My favourite combination is tomato slices topped with bresaola, fresh basil leaves and paprikakrém.
Now scan the net for cheap ticks to Hungary and off you go! I once flew to Budapest for 48 Euros, return all included. I wish you the same luck!
Now this is a nicely odd tea: gentle blue and tasting like cucumbers. Gol gavzaban or borage is mostly used as a savoury herb in the South of France. Iranians, an ancient and sophisticated nation that they are, pick just the flowers and make tea out of them. They claim it has health benefits but I think they drink mostly because it is so bizarre and when you have a few millennia of tea-drinking behind you, you need something like this to get past your excitement threshold and get the kick.
Quail eggs are a frequent guest in my fridge.
unt Pranee, whose diminutive build does not easily mesh with her name meaning "cosmic energy", is fixing me somtam, a fiery salad of shredded unripe papaya. For many years that I spent in Thailand it became my staple food. In a hot climate like there your body craves a spicy kick to perk itself up, and somtam fulfils that function perfectly. In goes a staggering variety of ingredients: from pickled fresh-water crabs and fried peanuts to hog plum and fish sauce. What looks like fossilized mini-piles of blonde poop turns out to be sugar. Thai food is a balance of sweet, sour, spicy and tart so palm sugar was responsible for the sweetneess in somtam.
In Thailand palm sugar is made mostly from the sap of the coconut palm, so it may sometimes be confusingly sold as "coconut sugar" or "palm honey" while, in fact, it has nothing to do with coconut fruits or bees. Depending on the degree of processing, the colour may vary from pale beige to hearty honey brown.
It definitely brings in more complex flavour than refined sugar. It is also less sweet and it adds honey-like mellow mildness to whatever you put it into. In the countries where it is common, it is sold in huge dollops that are dirt-cheap. In Europe I buy it in miniature stacks of neat rounds encircled in strips of bamboo wood (as on the picture).
he wonder of Da Shan, Monkey Head Mushroom!" Gaudy red characters on a package in my local Chinese shop cried for attention. They got mine. I had no idea what was so wondrous about this weird-looking fungus but I would just google it once back home.It turned out the characters did not lie. Decoction of this mushroom (猴頭菇 - hou-tou-gu) is used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat or prevent such conditions as indigestion, thrombosis, dementia, neurasthenia as well as the ulcers and cancer of the stomach, duodenal and oesophagus. It is known to reduce to level of lipids in blood.The secret behind such an astonishingly wide strike zone is ascribed to the polysaccharides that address the root of those seemingly unrelated conditions.It is one of the Four Culinary Treasures of China, the other three are bear's paws, trepangs and shark fins. It is also known as Lion's Mane Mushroom, Bearded Tooth Mushroom, Hedgehog Mushroom, Bearded Hedgehog Mushroom, pom pom mushroom, or Bearded Tooth Fungus. Its Latin name, Hericium erinaceus, is only used in scientific literature while the Japanese name, yamabushitake (山伏茸) frequently occurs in commercial contexts.
rapping is a great way of cooking. Russians use cabbage leaves, Thais - pandan leaves, the Chinese - lotus leaves, the Japanese - bamboo leaves, Indians - banana leaves, Mexicans - corn husks. In Laos and Vietnam they stuff food into pieces of bamboo trunk. The whole shebang is about letting the wrapping flavour permeate the rest of the ingredients.
In the Near East, a vaguely defined area spanning from Greece and Romania to Armenia and Syria, grapes leaves (a.k.a. vine leaves) enjoy a wide coinage. Their flavour is not that strong but the pleasantly sourish kick they bring to food is well worth the trouble of wrapping. My parents are lucky to use fresh ones from their garden but I have to buy them jarred. Most of the preserved varieties I see in Europe are imported from Turkey. I buy mine in an Iranian-run shop at Brixton Market. The first dish I cooked in London using grape leaves was charcoal grilled sardines.
n Russian, it is called "sea cabbage" or laminaria and is normally the base ingredient for an uninspired pickled salad. When Yeltsin and his cronies were busy plundering Soviet assets, canned laminaria salad was one of the few items always available in food shops. This seaweed's taste would have forever associated for me with Yeltin's hunger winters, had I not rediscovered it upon moving to Japan. The Japanese know a myriad highly delectably uses for it and it is in Japan that I grew to love this multifarious kelp.
For hundreds of years in Buddhist Japan a ban on meat consumption ban was in force, so people had to come up with something else than veal or chicken stock for cooking. Kombu, as it is known in Japan, is one of the three main soup bases (dashi). It is of gentler flavour than the other two, which are made of dried flakes of skipper mackerel (katsuo) and shiitake.
When it is sold dry it comes in two ways: shredded (on the picture) or in sheets. It is always covered with sharp-tasting residual sea salt and hence is high in iodine. When consumed over a long period of time, kombu is known to reduce grey hair and darken your natural hair hue. Thanks to it, through the years I have gone from light brown to dark brown with not a silver hair in sight.
I use it to make stock for miso-shiru, to make congee or o-kayu for breakfast, to prepare delicious beer snack tsukudani.
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.
n the olden days, this spicy Korean condiment was left for half a year outside to ferment in large earthen pots. As a food purist as I am, I don't even dream of going to such lengths in quest of authenticity. All I need to do is to go to a Korean store, although quite a few Chinese and Japanese shops these days carry gochujang too.
It is made from chilli paste, bean powder and ground glutinous rice, which distinguishes it from Chinese doubanjian made in a very similar fashion but from chillies and beans. Gochujang's deliciously pungent aroma is essential for such trademark Korean dishes as bibimbap and naengmeyon.
According to Mrs. Che Cheun Suni, my first Japanese teacher, who also happens to be of a very noble Korean lineage, gochujang does possess certain aphrodisiac qualities, making men as hot and fiery as its taste. I welcome your comments on that, should you have a first-hand experience.
his is NOT a banana. This is a plantain!" Oby definitely has a point. For Nigerians (and Jamaicans) it is a kind of potato that you can fry, boil, mash or make pies from.I saw similar ones, if somewhat smaller, in Thailand, where they call them kluay nam wah (กล้วยน้ำว้า) and grill them on charcoals.You can definitely know they are not your regular dessert bananas because they have black stones inside.The easiest and most common thing you can do with a plantain is to fry it in oil.- Heat a frying pan on medium high heat.
- Add oil, wait until it gets hot.
- Slice plantains into 2-3mm wedges and sprinkle them with salt.
- Put the wedges in the pan. Fry until golden brown.
- Serve with hkatenkwan or abenkwan or any other African or Caribbean dish of your choice.
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.
nown in the past as Jew's ear, these days it is safer to call it kikurage (キクラゲ) by its Japanese name. Its alternative name, jelly ear, is not very widely recognised, while the Latin name, Auricularia auricula-judae, is too cumbersome. The Chinese name hei mu er (黑木耳) will hardly ever catch on, will it?
Once I had to ask Floyd to buy it for me in a Chinese shop. None of the names seemed to work although hei mu er proved outside Floyd's linguistic abilities. Finally, he gave up on seeking help from the shop's people and, after quite an effort, managed to locate it himself. The bag said "Black Fungus".
Kikurage is sold dry in most Asian stores. It expands a lot when soaked in water (takes about 30 minutes). The pictures below is the same mushroom as above before soaking! It has a faint earthy flavour and gently crunchy, agaric texture for which it is mostly prized. I don't know what kind of coincidence it is, but kikurage is only popular in the traditionally Confucian countries - Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan and Vietnam. It is not particularly click with the rest of Asia.
In traditional Chinese medicine hei mu er is believed to possess anti-thrombosis properties, that is, it de-clogs your arteries and veins. By extension, it is believed to promote longevity. Polysaccharides that it contains have a tumour-preventive effect.
I use it in a variety of dishes: from sashimi (it is one of the few mushrooms you can eat raw) to noodles and sweet-and-sour chicken. It does not need much cooking and can be added just a couple of minutes before the dish is ready.
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.
use shrimp stock (fumet de crevettes) as the base for bechamel and so should you, it makes the whole difference, giving the lowly mix of fried flour and cream whole dimensions of flavour and richness. 
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