I feel like reverse engineering substitutes and basic concepts out of doing a lot of recipes sucks ass. How do you do this better, preferrably without getting someone from that region to teach you because where I live is not that kind of melting pot
I feel like reverse engineering substitutes and basic concepts out of doing a lot of recipes sucks ass. How do you do this better, preferrably without getting someone from that region to teach you because where I live is not that kind of melting pot
I don’t know where you are or what types of cuisine you’re interested in trying but I’ve been able to find decent Asian grocery stores pretty much everywhere in the US, Latam, and Europe. Just getting some basic stuff like gochujang, kimchi, mirin, dashi, sichuan peppers, doubanjiang, sesame oil, etc. opens up a TON of fun dishes. I’ve recently been having a blast cooking Japanese food with my girlfriend, mirin and hondashi are really the only things needed to transform local ingredients into quite authentic tasting Japanese dishes. Same principle applies with Korean and Chinese, you only need a few key ingredients and then you can go wild and cook pretty much anything
It’s enough of a melting pot I can find most non-persihables you mentioned easily but then there’s also really no good supply of fresh kimchi, for example. So I’m wondering, for example, with the abundance of sauerkraut here in germany if I were to just add some ingredients does that get close enough, you get me?
I can easily do the equivalent of spaghetti and meatballs, i.e. italo-american, for most of anything and give a local pan fry the japanese / korean / vietnamese spin but it’s still not the cuisine
Making your own kimchi is quite easy! Not sure you’d use enough to justify it but it’s a fun weekend project. It’s basically just fermented cabbage with chili powder, I don’t think mixing spice into already fermented sauerkraut would work well though. If you want suggestions for “proper” dishes you can make with the basics my staples are bibimbap, bokkumbap, mapo tofu, laziji, nikujaga, and Japanese curry. All very easy and certainly representative of KR/CN/JP cuisine (China obv has huge variety but I prefer sichuan dishes)