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Archive for category Unusual Ingredients

Hibiscus Iced Tea

Sep 20

Posted by adit in mexican, thai, Unusual Ingredients | 1 Comment

Hibiscus flowers aren’t found too commonly in grocery stores here, but that’s surprising given their popularity in many well known cuisines here.  Latin Americans will know them as the jamaica flowers.  Jamaicans know it as sorrel, and Thais often call it roselle.  As you can imagine then, the best place to find this is at a Mexican or Thai grocery store (at least in LA, maybe your local grocery store carries it?).

The flavor of hibiscus tea has the tartness of cranberry juice, but with just a little bit more bite.  There’s a hint of a cumin like flavor at the finish.  The is incredibly easy to make.  The only drawback is that it does require a fair amount of sugar (depending on the sweetness you like).  Click after the break for the recipe.

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Seared Pepper-Salt Tofu

Sep 19

Posted by adit in chinese, Unusual Ingredients | No Comments

Another recipe from Alford and Duguid (Hot Sour Salty and Sweet).  We just had a little bit of left over the other day and needed to do something with it.  This turned out to be the perfect thing, and it was so good that we will definitely do it again, just with more .

You definitely need a non-stick surface for this.  A well seasoned wok would be best because you can really get the high heat that you want.  A coated non-stick wok may work fine too, but I’m not sure.

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Two Pepper-Salt Spice Dip

Sep 19

Posted by adit in chinese, Unusual Ingredients | No Comments

Another recipe from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.  This one is from Hot Sour Salty and Sweet.  It’s a simply chinese dip that I used for a seared tofu recipe (posting soon).

Ingredients:

  • 1 teaspoon dried Thai (or Kashmiri) red chili, crushed
  • 1 teaspoon dry roasted Sichuan peppercorn
  • 2 tablespoons salt

Method:

Add all ingredients to a mortar and pestle and grind to a powder.

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Dai Grilled Chicken

Sep 19

Posted by adit in chinese, Unusual Ingredients | No Comments

This recipe comes from one of our favorite series of cookbooks.  They are written by a couple names Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.  They do a lot of travel and food writing mostly (at least so far) throughout Asia.  This particular recipe comes from their book Beyond the Great Wall, which focuses on the less travelled parts of China.

Sichuan peppercorns are a really interesting beast because unlike traditional black peppercorns, they don’t provide really any heat.  Incredibly aromatic and even sensual to your tongue (they cause a slight numbing effect for me, personally), their flavor is rather intense and can be transformed through dry roasting, as is done in this recipe.

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Turkish Cucumber and Mint Soup

Sep 13

Posted by amrita in mediterranean, Unusual Ingredients | No Comments

Source: Sunset Magazine, August 2010

This -based —similar to cacik—is seasoned with Aleppo pepper, a chile grown in Syria and Turkey that has a smoky note.

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An Amaranth and Eggplant Dinner

Jun 19

Posted by adit in indian, Unusual Ingredients | No Comments

We made this a couple weeks ago, and it was surprising how well the amaranth (chauli) and roasted eggplant went together.  The sweet/spicy flavor of the is complemented very well with the ever so slight bitterness of the amaranth.

As usual, our introduction to amaranth was simply because our farmer’s market sells and and we decided to try it.  If you do come across this at your own market, I highly suggest giving it a try.  My taste buds are pretty sensitive to bitter things (arugula for example, is so bitter to me that it is basically inedible), so considering I really like this green means that it is not overly bitter.

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Spring = Green Garlic!

May 17

Posted by adit in Unusual Ingredients | No Comments


Green Garlic Bulb

Green bulb with stem cut off

Hopefully wherever you live, the above adage is also true.  You definitely won’t find green garlic at the plain old grocery store, so you’ll have to try a farmer’s market (sometimes it’s called ‘young garlic’).  We hadn’t heard of/seen it until we moved to SoCal.  It looks similar to a spring onion, except with a large bulb at the bottom (pictured) and the green stalks are wider and thicker (not pictured).

While it’s definitely still garlic, it has a bit of a softer flavor and can be used in all kinds of things.  The first variety of recipes we tried were from the article A Spring Menu with Green Garlic and Scapes.  My favorite was the Double Garlic Soup, which if you like garlic, is phenomenal!  They use scapes, which I’ve found are difficult to find, so I just used the greens from the green garlic and it worked well.  The Penne with Roasted Garlic, Pancetta, and Arugula was also really good.  Basically, the pancetta and arugula can be substituted for any veggie combination you like in your pasta.

Yesterday, I used some green garlic to make a to put into an udon noodle (recipe will be in another post, I promise).  The paste is really simple.

Green Garlic Chili Paste

Chop the green garlic grind it to a paste with some ginger, chili sambal (Sambal Oelek), salt, and some oil (I used peanut) in a mortar and pestle.  If you’re making a lot, then a food processor would work, too, although it will require more oil.  I used just enough oil to work it into a smooth paste.  The approximate amounts I used are:

  • 2 large cloves of green garlic, chopped
  • 1/4 teaspoon of chopped ginger (just a hint, don’t want to overpower the garlic)
  • 1 teaspoon of chili sambal
  • pinch of salt

You could use this in any stir-fry, but it works really well in soups.  Throw a dollop into some Tom Yum, and I’m sure it would be good.

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