I love Asian supermarkets. I remember recently walking through the ‘New Yen Yen Supermarket’ at Eastwood, Sydney with a friend of mine, darting from isle to isle, handling, sniffing, and laughing at all the strange products we could find. My friend picked up a frozen baby turtle like it was a hidden treasure chest he’d just stumbled upon. At this a Chinese man in the isle started laughing and began to pull out even stranger items from the depths of the icy freezer: bullfrogs, abolone, and other things that didn’t really have a shape or colour, and i’m sure don’t have a translatable name.
But I love Asian supermarkets because there are a few things that I frequently use in cooking that are best bought there. Here’s a copy of my typical shopping list:
2L light soy sauce (much cheaper at the Asian Supermarkets and you can buy in bulk)
Shaoxing rice wine (this is a delicious, dark rice wine that with a tablespoon adds an incredible amount of flavour to your stir-fries)
Thai Palm Sugar (an absolute essential in Thai cooking and has a soft, rich, caramel flavour. Make sure you get the dark one in a cylinder and it should be just soft when you shave it)
Mao Ploy Thai Curry Paste (this is the best Thai curry paste you can buy and is the product that a huge number of Thai restaurants use. Be careful though, it has a lot more chilli than the western pastes)
Dried, smoked squid (this is the Chinese equivalent of Beef Jerky, but made from squid. It is the quintessential beer snack!)
Coconut milk (cheaper and usually richer in flavour at Asian Supermarkets)
Banana Leaves (a fantastic product to wrap fish in to barbeque)
Shrimp paste (this is the stinkiest product on the market, but an essential ingredient in South East Asian cooking; be careful, use more than 1/4 teaspoon and you’ll be tasting plankton shrimp for the next month).
Chinese Five Spice (a great spice mix that makes a boring stir-fry or braise taste great. Can usually get it cheaper and in bulk at the Asian Supermarkets)
I’m sure there is much that you could add to this list, and there is much at these Supermarkets than I’m sure I’m neglecting. Would love to hear the prized purchases of others when they frequent the Asian Supermarket.
Nick
(A friend of mine at college, Sam, gave me the idea for this post – thanks Sam!)
My prized purchases – baby bok choy (so cheap!), canned bamboo shoots, firm and soft tofu (again, cheap!), hoi sin sauce, vermicelli, miso paste, pork balls (for soup dishes), laksa paste, Indonesian gado gado sauce, sambal olek…I could go on.
Authentic ingredients for a fraction of the price!
I like Mao Ploy too – only problem is I use a little and then the whole tub goes to waste. How long does curry paste keep in the fridge? I’ve always wondered…
Thanks for the comment Soph. Sounds like most of your shopping is done at the Asian supermarket!
I’m curious, do you find tofu cheaper or better at the Asian Supermarket? We are right into tofu at the moment, but have only really used the firm stuff. What sort of dishes do you use the soft tofu in? Also… what is gado gado sauce?
On keeping curry pastes, David Thompson (who is THE authority on Thai food) says that if you make your own paste it will only keep for about a week in the fridge, and he says that freezing it will make it taste bitter. But i think the bought pastes are a different story. To be honest, i kept a tub of Ma Ploy Mussaman Paste in our fridge for what was probably 8 months and it still tasted great. I think there is enough salt, oil and sugar to make it last pretty much indefinitely unless it smells really rank or starts growing hairs. The other thing you can do, and i did this the other night, is to empty the rest of the paste into a jar and cover it by about 1/2 cm in vegetable oil. The oil prevents any oxygen getting to the paste and thereby making it impossible for bacteria to survive and breed. Then every time you use the paste, just top it up again with oil.
Thanks,
Nick
Good tip with the curry paste!
I find chinese shops have cheaper tofu. Not necessarily better though – most of the supermarkets stock the chinese varieties anyway, but for some reason it’s cheaper at certain asian supermarkets.
Soft tofu – there’s a mince and tofu dish that soft tofu goes well with and lots of chinese people cook as a staple, I’ll see if I can dig up the recipe! Other than that, I’m not too sure – soup perhaps? I can imagine it would go well with miso soup, some baby bok choy and udon or ramen.
Gado gado – it consists of peanut sauce, spices and chilli, and you eat it with Indonesian salad. It tastes great. Again, I’ll see if I can dig up a recipe and post it on my blog…