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Supermarkets Are Selling the Foods Needed to Explore the Globe From Your Kitchen

Posted on: Monday, 16 January 2006, 06:00 CST

When sushi is sold in supermarkets and Thai restaurants spring up in suburbs, you know ethnic eating has gone mainstream.

The next logical step is for home chefs to cook these dishes themselves. For many, the biggest bugaboo is stocking an ethnic pantry.

But it doesn't need to be. As cities and suburbs have grown more diverse, supermarket chains have responded by stocking such nontraditional staples as rice noodles, plantains, fresh mozzarella and dried chilies _ and the list is growing. What was once the purveyance of mom-and-pop shops in ethnic neighborhoods now is sold in most suburban groceries.

Matt Jonas, vice president of sales and marketing for Balls Food Stores, which owns Hen House, Price Chopper and Balls stores, has been in the grocery business 40 years. From his center-court seat, he has watched the grocery business evolve from one driven by white, middle-class needs to one that encompasses a global view of food.

According to Jonas, three things drive the ethnic foods trend: immigration, television's Food Network and travel.

"We see the growth of Hispanics, primarily, but there are certainly larger Asian communities," Jonas says. "Many more homes have access to the Food Network, and those guys are always coming up with new ingredients. And we are a much more mobile society. We travel more _ to Canada, Mexico, Asia _ and when we're on vacation, we try something new and come back home and want to play with it. As a grocer, you listen to the influences and see how fast you can get the ingredients."

In his job, Jonas must read the tea leaves to see what foodstuff will be the next new thing. On his short list for 2006: chimichurri, an Argentine sauce of olive oil, vinegar, herbs and spices that accompanies meat; dulce de leche, a caramel sauce made with slow-cooked sugar and cream; Cuban food; Indian spices and ingredients; and kosher meats.

If you understand basic ingredients and cooking techniques _ how to use a stovetop burner, an oven, a broiler and a grill _ you can travel the world in your kitchen, taking friends and family on a global expedition. Cook Vietnamese on Monday, travel to Italy on Wednesday via dinner and tour Cuba over the weekend with a roast pork and black beans and rice.

After all, it's just as easy to make an Italian bean and tuna salad dressed with olive oil and lemon juice as it is a mayonnaise-based tuna salad. And there are myriad ways to cook chicken instead of pan-frying it. Add lemongrass and soy sauce for a Southeast Asian version, roast it with tarragon for a French version, sprinkle it with paprika to make it Eastern European or simmer it with coconut milk, a few spices and curry powder for a Malaysian curry.

The main ingredient and the cooking techniques are familiar; only the spices and seasonings may be unfamiliar.

Some ingredients are unique to specific cultures: fish sauce for Southeast Asian fare and curry powder for Indian, for example. But many ingredients are mix and match. Cilantro is found in cuisines as diverse as Mexican and Thai. Chickpeas show up in dishes from India, Italy and the Middle East. Other ingredients can work as substitutes. If you don't have rice noodles to make a Chinese noodle dish, use linguine instead.

Michele Peck, a mother and full-time teacher, says she doesn't do much ethnic cooking because she doesn't recognize some of the ingredients in the recipes and doesn't know where to find them in the grocery store. And as a working mom, she thinks she has less time to learn how to cook ethnic dishes.

"I've never done my own pasta (sauce), not that I wouldn't want to, but what if I goof up and it's no good? Then we'd have no dinner," she says.

In the last year Peck has begun using some ethnic ingredients, like cilantro and hoisin sauce, and cooks black beans and rice for her family, easing her way into the ethnic mainstream.

To expedite your own global cooking journey, stock the pantry with some basic ingredients, most of which can be found in your local supermarket. Some will keep indefinitely; others must be purchased as needed.

Cookbook author Mark Bittman, whose most recent book is "The Best Recipes in the World" (Broadway, 2005), offers one particularly useful piece of advice when shopping for ethnic ingredients: Read labels carefully.

Soy sauce, for example, should be made with only soy, wheat, a culture, salt and bacteria. Steer clear of soy sauce made with hydrolyzed vegetable protein and colored with caramel. The same advice applies to fish sauce, also called nam pla or nuoc mam. The first ingredient should be salt-cured anchovies.

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AUTHOR BRINGS HOME THE WORLD

Prominent cookbook author Mark Bittman has made it his mission to get home chefs acclimated to cooking international dishes.

In researching his most recent book, "The Best Recipes in the World" (Broadway, 2005), he traveled to more than 40 countries that represent what Bittman delineates as the great cooking regions of the world _ France, Italy, China, Iberia (which includes Spain and Portugal), Scandinavia, North Africa and Southeast Asia. As he explained over lunch recently, he traveled to places "where I knew I could get great recipes."

Although his aim was to remain as true to the original recipes as possible, authenticity was not necessarily his goal. He was willing to tweak recipes for ease and ingredient availability.

"I wasn't as concerned whether the dish was made by a grandmother in a village and it took two days to make it. I wanted to help someone ... make it in their kitchen," he said.

During the process Bittman learned that "ingredients change, but technique does not. Most home chefs have no idea how easy it is to cook ethnic at home."

As he writes in his introduction: "The techniques of cooking _ applying heat to food with the goal of making it more digestible, palatable and, ultimately, delicious _ are pretty much the same wherever you go. ... It's the flavors that change."

"Italians use a lot more lemon than lime, a lot more olive oil than peanut oil," he said. "And if cooking Vietnamese, use fish sauce more often than soy sauce."

Trained as a journalist, not a chef, Bittman is a self-taught cook who speaks Everyman's language. He takes the fear factor out of preparing all sorts of dishes such as Yucatecan-style garlic shrimp, tandoori chicken, stuffed grape leaves and beef lo mein. And nearly every ingredient is in the local supermarket.

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(c) 2006, The Kansas City Star.

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PHOTO (from KRT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): ethnicfoods

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Source: The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri)

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