Must-have ingredients for Asian recipes?

December 10, 2008 1:28 PM

What are some useful, delicious, and hard-to-find ingredients for Asian cooking?

My brother enjoys cooking, and also likes Asian Food. I live next to an Asian grocery mart, so for Christmas I figured I'd fill a basket with all kinds of hard-to-find ingredients that he can use for his cooking. Unfortunately, I don't know all that much about Asian cooking, so I figured I'd turn to you guys for help. Here are my criteria:

1. Useful in several recipes.
2. Relatively non-perishable. I can do produce, but only if it will last for a few days un-refrigerated.
3. Not readily available (like sesame seeds, soy sauce, etc).

Examples I've come up with: Pepper paste, dashi, packs of nori, tonkatsu sauce, good sake.
Examples of things that won't work, for various reasons: Whole durian, whole freeze-dried squid.

So what are your "must-haves" for Asian cooking?

posted by specialagentwebb to food & drink (17 comments total)

- sriracha chili sauce (the plastic bottle of red sauce with a rooster on the front).
- mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine)
- it would be kind of cool if you printed him a little booklet of recipes for the basket. epicurious.com has a few.
posted by smalls at 1:38 PM on December 10, 2008

"Asian cooking" is pretty broad. Natto isn't going to be of much use to him if he likes to cook mostly Thai, and palm sap vinegar isn't going to be of much use if he doesn't like Filipino food. Your examples are mostly Japanese-ish - if he likes that, I would also suggest:

Japanese-style mayonnaise (Kewpie brand is good)
some packages of yuba (dried bean curd skins)
an assortment of furikake (seasoning blends for rice etc.)
katsuobushi (dried fish) and kombu (dried kelp) for making his own dashi
good green tea
good rice
panko breadcrumbs
a good rice vinegar
a good mirin (sweet rice wine for cooking)
dry udon and soba noodles
good temari or soy sauce
posted by peachfuzz at 1:39 PM on December 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

As someone who enjoys cooking, I think your brother would most benefit from weird ingredients he'll have no clue how to use. Let him try and figure out how to use spices he can't even pronounce.
posted by valadil at 1:40 PM on December 10, 2008

Fish sauce
posted by Atom12 at 1:41 PM on December 10, 2008

Fermented black beans and Szechuan peppercorns are both very useful and hard to find in non-Asian groceries. Both are small and have a good shelf-life.

If he is into SE Asian food, belachan (NB this is very smelly once opened!) and candlenuts make appearances in many recipes, but may be of limitted use to him...
posted by Westringia F. at 1:46 PM on December 10, 2008

"Asian cooking" is pretty broad. Natto isn't going to be of much use to him if he likes to cook mostly Thai, and palm sap vinegar isn't going to be of much use if he doesn't like Filipino food. Your examples are mostly Japanese-ish

His cooking tastes themselves are pretty broad. I named mostly Japanese things because they're the ones that I'm familiar with, but the grocery has a huge variety of products from all over Asia.

Great answers so far, though! Keep 'em coming!
posted by specialagentwebb at 2:00 PM on December 10, 2008

lemongrass
galangal
turmeric (fresh, not powdered)
lotus root (maybe in fried chip form?)
fish sauce
giant tin of sesame oil (way cheaper at asian markets)
posted by gnutron at 2:10 PM on December 10, 2008

Fermented bean curd. Like fish sauce and belachan, it is very stinky and a little goes a long way. Great for vegetable stir fry.
posted by Mountain Goatse at 2:20 PM on December 10, 2008

Thai curry pastes in small cans are handy time-savers and have a long shelf life. I like Maesri brand; there are about a dozen different flavors in cans with different color labels. Most other brands I've tried have been blah to awful, so try to find Maesri. My favorite flavor is red (many Thai curries are known by their colors).

Of course you'll need coconut milk for your Thai curry. I like Chef's Choice or Chaokoh brands. The former has a blue label with a yellow chef's hat silhouette, and the latter is brown with a picture of an opened coconut. Be careful here as there's a cheaper knockoff brand with a very similar name and label that's not nearly as good.

Fish sauce (nam pla) is another must. Tiparos is my favorite brand but there's not as much difference among brands here as with the other products.

For Chinese cooking: hot bean paste, hoisin sauce, black bean sauce, sesame oil (get a toasted sesame oil from Japan, like Maruhon - the quality and batch-to-batch consistency are much better than the Chinese brands I've tried. Oil from untoasted sesame seeds, like you'd find in a Western health food store, doesn't have enough flavor). Soy sauce of course - my fave is "mushroom soy sauce" from Pearl River Bridge, which is a dark ever-so-slightly sweet soy sauce that has no mushroom flavor that I can discern. It's my default soy sauce unless a dish needs a light soy sauce, in which case I prefer good old Kikkoman (low salt, actually).

Indian? Go nuts with whole spices. They keep well in tightly sealed glass jars stored in a dark cupboard. Bottled chutneys can be fun too; try various brands and types. There's a whole world of crazy chutneys to explore. Also some unusual-to-Western-eyes staples like poha (pounded rice flakes), besan (chickpea flour), and a zillion types of legumes.

A couple of good cookbooks might not be amiss either, to help him use the bounty.
posted by Quietgal at 2:26 PM on December 10, 2008 [1 favorite]

From a Vietnamese perspective, what my family always seemed to keep stocked is:

Lemongrass - Comes in whole stalks or packaged-prepared (just the edible bits). I like working with the whole stalks, especially with soups.
Star Anise - Key ingredient in Pho, and can be used in homemade chai tea, too!
Ginger - Maybe not as exotic an ingredient as you'd like
Fish sauce - Every Vietnamese family has their own secret recipe for fish sauce dip, mixing it with sugar/lime/chili/ginger/pickled carrots/etc
Soy sauce - Note that I find a marked taste difference between Japanese and Vietnamese variants. For instance, eating sushi with Vietnamese style soy sauce just doesn't taste right.
Sriracha sauce - Yum!

And err... crystalline MSG. Although that's been absent from my family's diet for years, and you might want to bypass it too.
posted by thisisnotbruce at 3:07 PM on December 10, 2008

Sichuan peppercorn is very hard to find outside of well-stocked Asian groceries. Also, Chinese rock sugar is used in braises and took me a couple trips to Chinatown to find. A lot of spices are insanely cheap in Asian markets including star anise and saffron.
posted by rabbitsnake at 3:37 PM on December 10, 2008

When it comes to saffron, "insanely cheap" is a relative term. If you haven't shopped for the stuff before, you're still liable to have a serious case of sticker shock. Saffron has the reputation as being the most expensive spice in the world, often running upwards of $75 per ounce. A lot of places sell it by the gram.
posted by Class Goat at 4:22 PM on December 10, 2008

Thinking in terms of desserts, since most of the regular stuff I'd mention has already been suggested... (this is mostly Southeast Asian stuff):

- Palm sugar / Gula melaka
- Agar
- Alkaline water / lye / "kan sui" (helps to firm up cake/pastry skin; especially useful for cakes/desserts that have imprints on them, like mooncakes and ang ku kueh)
- A variety of flours: tapioca flour, mung bean flour, rice flour / mochi flour, glutinous rice flour; these are very useful for making a LOT of desserts and snacks... like goreng pisang (fried plantains), fried rice cakes (mix rice flour with water to make a paste, add flavouring and/or a bit of ice cream, and fry the batter to make little 'pancakes' that are puffy and light... they can be eaten with all sorts of things and they're really simple to make), mochi, etc
- Yam, sweet potatoes, taro
- A variety of beans and seeds (e.g. red beans, soy beans, lotus seeds...); I'm thinking of making bean paste from scratch here, for dishes like shanghainese red-bean pancakes, tang-yuan fillings, mooncake fillings, etc
- If he doesn't want to make bean/seed paste from scratch, you can also buy cans/tins of ready-made bean/seed paste.
- Speaking of mooncakes... a mooncake mold would be really nice.
- Pandan / screwpine essence, and leaves (the former helps to flavour a lot of desserts, and the latter is used to wrap a lot of cakes/jellies)
- Sago (aka tapioca pearls / balls)
- Gingko nuts, ginseng root, dried sugar-coated winter melon (tong tung kwa)...

Misc, less "dessert"-y ingredients:

- Shao-hsing cooking wine
- Preserved eggs: Salted eggs, century eggs (although it is also possible to make salted eggs with shaohsing cooking wine, ziplock bags and salt... Century eggs are almost impossible to make at home unless you have tons of quicklime, wood ash, lots of free time and lots of open-air backyard space). These are good to eat with rice congee, with tofu, in omelettes, or (for century eggs) wrapped in slices of ginger.
- Dried shitake mushrooms, dried wood's ear mushrooms (both super useful for a variety of dishes... you can add them to almost anything. I use them in making chawanmushi, a bunch of vegetable and meat dishes, spring rolls, etc..)
- A variety of dried noodles is useful too. I like rice noodles and mung bean noodles; the mung bean noodles turn clear when they're cooked, and they're also used for spring rolls...
- Spring roll wrappers are useful too! At least, they're useful to me.
- Miso paste (somehow this hasn't been mentioned yet I think?)
- Tamarind paste (I think this hasn't been mentioned either? I use it for dishes like Asam curries/sauces)
- Daikon / radish; my Korean friend uses this a lot

If some of the dishes/ingredients I'm mentioning sound unfamiliar, here are some blogs / websites that have lots of yummy Southeast Asian recipes.
posted by aielen at 4:45 PM on December 10, 2008

For Indonesian/Balinese cooking

Kecap Manis (pronounced, bewilderingly, ketchup mayonnaise)
Shallots,
Lemongrass
Galangal
Really Hot Chilis (can be frozen)
Sambal (many varieties, all delicious)
Palm Sugar
Shrimp Paste
Tamarind Pulp
posted by Ghidorah at 7:57 PM on December 10, 2008

Kaffir lime and thai basil (hard to find even here in NYC)
posted by ch1x0r at 8:23 PM on December 10, 2008

I would add okonomiyaki sauce to the Japanese condiments list - if he has that and some kewpie mayo it's such a quick and easy meal.
posted by Emilyisnow at 10:46 PM on December 10, 2008

Umeboshi plums

Amchoor
posted by protorp at 11:49 PM on December 10, 2008