Fish sauce, according to the ingredients on the bottle, it has anchovies, sugar, and salt. The 77% of fish extract definitely gives this fish sauce a strong...aroma. A little goes a long way. Thai and Vietnamese cooks use this in their stir fries, and make dipping sauces out of it. In fact, in many Thai/Viet restaurants have this stuff laying around like American joints have bottles of ketchup on their table. I've had this bottle for about 3 months now and it still looks like its new. If you decide to buy some, try to find the smallest bottle you can find.
This is a type of pasta that is commonly used in many types of Asian cooking. It's actually a huge sheet soft pasta made out of rice flour that's cut into centimeter strips. Its already precooked, but people typically cook it again to add flavor to the noodles. If you are familiar with dim sum, this is the same type of rice wrapper that they use for the dish where they wrap pork, beef or shrimp with the rice paper and drizzle a yummy, sweet soy sauce over everything. I am going to make a pad see ew with this tonight.
I had an opportunity to stop by the Asian mega-mart in north Austin today and I picked up some goodies that I would like to blog about. The first one is dried tofu. It's probably the most dense and it is sold fairly dry (compared to the white blocks submerged in water). As you can see in the picture below, the outside is a dark brown. I don't think the tofu is smoked, but it's got more of a nutty smoked flavor than the plain white variety.
This type of tofu is very versatile. Sliced into matchsticks, you can stir fry them with pork and spring onion for a very tasty dish. You can cut them into small cubes and make a sauce with ground pork and bean paste for noodles. And a very common way to serve dried tofu is by soaking/cooking in the spiced soy sauce first and then slicing them thinly to serve as an appetizer. In the next two days, I will be making a type of chinese empanada with chinese leeks, dried tofu, rice noodles, and egg. And then, I will be making an assortment of spiced (soy sauce based) goodies for appetizers. It's a bit different than 5 spice powder, instead its a little pouch full of lightly crushed (not ground) spices. The spices include cinnamon, fennel, ginger, cumin, clove. Pronounced lu bao in Chinese, it literally translates to spicing pack. The spicing process involves cooking meat, tofu, eggs, potatoes, or even peanuts in a highly concentrated soy sauce based, spiced soup. The food just soaks in the flavors beautifully. This spice can be found at any chinese store and is super cheap. $1.39 will get you 6 individual packets.
When using these spice packets, you just drop the whole bag into whatever you are cooking: much like brewing tea. There is a set of badly translated set of instructions on the back of the bag. With some good inference skills, an English speaker can easily learn to incorporate this spice packet into his/her cooking repertoire. For awhile, I was under the impression that sweet vermouth and Marsala, both fortified wines, were very similar. Well, tonight, I will put that myth to rest as I do a side-by-side comparative taste test.
Marsala Darker in color, it smells like a rich, red wine. Slightly sweet in flavor, with a hint of nuts and raisins, it leaves the palate with a distinct mushroom-y unami flavor. Sweet Vermouth Lighter in color, it smells of oregano. One might say the smell reminds them of spaghetti sauce. Sweeter, and more raisin-y, it leaves the palate with a very slight mushroom-y flavor. |