How exotic can an ingredient be

[Suvir Saran]

What do you do when you open a book and many of the ingredients in the recipes are those you could not find easily in your local grocery?

Would you make the trip to an ethnic grocer?

Would you skip t he recipe and look for another?

Would you be upset you bought that book?

How do you define an ingredient as being exotic?

How far are you willing to go in experimenting with a new cuisine?

How many ingredients and how many dollars do you think you would be willing to spend in the pursuit of learning a new cuisine?

[Monica Bhide]

This is a fasinating question. I struggle with this all the time when i write. How authentic should my recipe be.. that can require the use of some "exotic" ingredients.. should I include it or should I find an "adequate" substitute.. This is a hard thing for authors. If I leave something out, then people might say "well it does not taste too Indian", if I leave it in, they might say " What is "Amchoor/Ajwain/etc? and I am not going out to buy this. I thought this was an easy book"... what is the happy medium.. not sure

Incidentally, when I try other cuisines, Thai or Malaysian or AMerican, I do make an effort to go out and buy the ingredients to ensure that I get as close to authentic as possible. I understand that cooking other cuisines from my Indian pantry is not possible!!

Edited April 24, 2003 by Monica Bhide (log)

[Kim WB]

First, I think I have realistic expectations of the ethnic cook books I buy...I rarely buy these online, and prefer to peruse them at the bookstore before purchasing.

I live in an area that has well stocked grocery stores, due to a diverse population. I prefer to purcahse the ingredients in a general food store with an extensive ethnic foods area ( WEgman's comes to mind), simply for time management. If a recipe is especially intriguing, I will stop at an ethnic grocer for an ingredient. Or, if I have a question about an application of the ingredient ( tamarind paste? concentrate?) I will go to the ethnic grocers, who in general are very helpful. ( You need to seek out the English speaking employees, when gestures and handsignals aren't working).

Then, if an ethnic dish becomes a part of my repertoire, I will then use the ethnic grocer to purchase a larger quantity of the required ingredient. I can get a handful of cardomom at Wegman's for twice the price of a bag full from my local IndoPak store.

What bothers me is that if a cookbook is using a more obscure ingredient, please provide all the names for it. I can't recall the specifics, but I was recently at two different groceries, and the ethnic grocers, looking for a "xyz" bean..with no luck, A shopper at the Indian store overheard my request, and said' Oh, the xyz bean is also called the abc bean", whcih was a relatively more common bean. Sorry, poor memory, I would need to dig out the recipes for more specifics. It was tiny and pink.

I have spend a considerable amount of money learning Thai and Indian...and am only a millimeter there! But I prefer to dine out, copies down names, and then reproduce it from the cookbooks I have. I am trying to get the basic building blocks down...Sag Paneer was a great success!

[Pan]

This is a fasinating question. I struggle with this all the time when i write. How authentic should my recipe be.. that can require the use of some "exotic" ingredients.. should I include it or should I find an "adequate" substitute.. This is a hard thing for authors. If I leave something out, then people might say "well it does not taste too Indian", if I leave it in, they might say " What is "Amchoor/Ajwain/etc? and I am not going out to buy this. I thought this was an easy book"

Anyone who doesn't like amchoor and ajwain is no friend of mine.

[torakris]

For me an exotic ingedient is either one I have never heard of before or one that I know will be almost impossible for me to find. So for me something that others might consider everyday foods like parsnips and cardoons are exotic because I have never tasted them before and have yet to run across them in Japan. When i first started Indain and Thai cooking for example, almost everything was exotic, but now my pantry is full with spices/beans/pastes and other ingredients from these countries (and I know where to buy when I run out) so they are no longer exotic.

I prefer cookbooks that stick to the recipe as best as they can with out "American-izing" it, there are quite a few recipes in Thai Food that I know I will never be able to make but that does not make me regret buying the book.

I also have no problem going to an ethnic grocer if needed.

[alithea]

I live in an area that has well stocked grocery stores, due to a diverse population.  I prefer to purcahse the ingredients in a general food store with an extensive ethnic foods area

But ethnic stores are usually so much cheaper! And there's nothing like that look of delight on an indian shopkeeper's face when a stranger comes in and asks for fresh curry leaves...

[trillium]

What do you do when you open a book and many of the ingredients in the recipes are those you could not find easily in your local grocery?

Find a better place to buy them.

Would you skip t he recipe and look for another?

It depends on whether I wanted to cook it that night or just sometime in the future.

Would you be upset you bought that book?

No way.

How do you define an ingredient as being exotic?

I wouldn't. I hate the word exotic actually. Exotic compared to what? When my partner was sick as a grad student he went to student health and they asked him if he'd eaten anything "exotic" lately when they found out he was from south east asia. He said, "well, yes, now that you mention it, I did have lunch at Burger King last week".

How far are you willing to go in experimenting with a new cuisine?

As far as I can get. This involves buying more then one cookbook on the subject, looking at websites devoted to the subject, asking co-workers who have more expertise then I (the field of science is great for international cooking tips), asking questions online, going to groceries that specialize in foodstuffs from that subject, and finally, as a last resort, mail order.

How many ingredients and how many dollars do you think you would be willing to spend in the pursuit of learning a new cuisine?

Please don't make me answer that question, it's not something I like to imagine! It's my hobby. I will say that over all, it costs less and is more rewarding then eating out.

These are some of the things I look for in a cookbook of a cuisine I'm not familiar with:

Good illustrations/pictures of things I'm going to have to go looking for. More than one variation on the name would help too. My favorite Singaporean cookbook has ingredient lists in Chinese characters, Cantonese, Tamil, Malay and English.

A brief explanation of how a grocery store specializing in the foodstuffs from that cuisine may be organized. The section in Grace Young's book is the best example of this.

An authoritative voice. I love it when a cookbook author says don't bother making this if you can't find X. I hate cookbooks that don't even bother telling you what the original ingredient should be. I don't like it when say, Thai recipes call for ketchup or peanut butter. Exactly how hard do they think it is to find tamarind and whole peanuts? I want honesty.

Reasonable substitutions. I like how Marcella Hazan talks crap about say, our scallops compared to the ones in Italy, and then tells you how to fix the problem with the flavor in the context of the recipe. Ok, so I want honesty mixed with some flexibility.

regards,

trillium

[Suvir Saran]

Trillium I loved your honest response and also those shared by others.

[Kim WB]

I live in an area that has well stocked grocery stores, due to a diverse population.  I prefer to purcahse the ingredients in a general food store with an extensive ethnic foods area

But ethnic stores are usually so much cheaper! And there's nothing like that look of delight on an indian shopkeeper's face when a stranger comes in and asks for fresh curry leaves...

So very true..but as I continued in the origianl post, my reasons are from a time management perspective. To me, and I realize this is not everybody, time is more valuable to me than saving a few bucks.

[Suvir Saran]

Kim, I think you are correct in wanting all the possible names that a shopper should know when looking for such ingredients.

Time is critical for all of us.

[Suzanne F]

Kim, I think you are correct in wanting all the possible names that a shopper should know when looking for such ingredients.

Time is critical for all of us.

That's one reason I have Linda Bladholm's three books: The Asian/Indian/Latin & Caribbean Grocery Store Demystified. And Elizabeth Schneider's books, and many, many other picture books on ingredients.

But I go about this question from the exact opposite direction: I go into an "ethnic" store, buy something that looks interesting (whether or not I know what it is ), then bring it home and try to figure out what to do with it. Sometimes I will find a recipe to follow; sometimes I will only find information about what it is and make up something based on similar ingredients I'm used to; sometimes I'm still clueless and just try anything. Haven't killed us yet with that approach. I'm all for the thrill of discovery!

And trillium, when you come down to it, most of the foods we eat are exotic (= "introduced from another country; not native to the place where found" -- Webster 10).