My Asian Ingredient Superheroes + Ingredient Cheat Sheet ·

26 May 2024, 00:00

2023 will soon come to a close and I’m extra grateful that you’ve joined me for the ride this year! I enjoy PTFS so much that my 2023 to do list got longer as we went along. One of the items was to offer you a list of my go-to ingredients for making Asian food. A paid subscriber suggested it months ago as a way for folks to know that they have all (or most of) the stuff for making recipes I write about.

But before we get to the ingredients, some other things to share!

It’s been 12 months since I launched Pass the Fish Sauce on Substack. There are currently over 13,000 subscribers, with nearly 500 paid subscribers. I never thought so many people would be interested and also directly pay for my content.

If you’ve not joined us as a paid subscriber, consider supporting PTFS a little extra. I’d love your extra love. In return, I pledge to serve up more engaging content, fun perks, and a bit of humor here and there.

As motivation, from now until December 31, you can score 25% discount off of annual subscriptions. Pay $37.50 instead of $50!

The discount applies to new and gift subscriptions. There’s no link or code required. I appreciate your support at all levels. Thanks in advance.

My Thanksgiving meal for two came together fast so I had time to make Persimmon Cookies from The Red Truck Bakery Cookbook, written by Brian Noyes, the bakery’s talented owner. I gleaned two great tips from baking the cakey, fluffy, cookies and posted Brian’s terrific recipe on my website. They are studded with raisins and walnuts but you can tweak the Persimmon Cookie recipe many ways.

With Thanksgiving leftover char siu roasted cauliflower, I made an outstanding vegetarian banh mi lined with mayonnaise, Maggi, 5-spice mushroom walnut pate, the cauliflower (reheat it in a skillet), daikon and carrot pickles, jalapeno, cucumber and cilantro.

The combination of earthy pate and salty, spicy, sweet slightly chewy cauliflower remarkably satisfied me like a standard banh mi featuring char siu pork with liver pate. No joke! The cauliflower, pate, pickles and mayo recipes are in Ever-Green Vietnamese (EGV). I misted the thawed Safeway footlong before baking it in 350F toaster oven for about 7 minutes, until crisp. (My mister is a hair salon tool.)

Also for Thanksgiving, I roasted half a chicken EGV-style doused with nuoc cham. (Halfsies roast fast and juicy!) With the other half chicken, I made EGV’s chicken and vegetable pho, which fed us lunch for 3 days. It was a biggish chicken so I added the wings and backbone, and increased everything else by about 20 percent to more pho broth. That’s kale in the above bowl. One chicken fed us for 5 meals and we weren’t bored! (If you have leftover turkey, make turkey pho or this Chinese-style turkey egg noodle soup that I did for Food & Wine.)

I wanted to get cooking classes going in 2023 but ran into stumbling blocks — namely my local teaching kitchen was no longer available. Figuring out online teaching involved a steep tech learning curve and I had to master lots this year, including online retail and mail order shipping. Thanks for your patience.

I promise to offer you online cooking classes in 2024!

First up, I’ll dip my toes in with an online class collaboration with Milk Street Kitchen. The team invited me to do an Ever-Green Vietnamese class on Tuesday, January 30, 2024. Registration just opened.

The first 20 registrants will get 50% off with this code: EVERGREEN50

Once the code runs out, get 15% off with this code: COOKWITHANDREA

Now, about my Asian Ingredient Superheroes…

My kitchen is embarrassingly packed with ingredients but I basically reach for the same ones on a day-to-day basis. When I develop recipes or write cookbooks, I’m sensitive to the fact that no one wants to hunt down an ingredient simply for one recipe. What a waste of time, money, and kitchen storage space!

We want multi-use superhero ingredients that are workhorses. Who has space for all the condiments on these shelves?

Below are roughly 40 ingredients that I most often use to cook with. The list may seem boring and some items are universal — which is the point. To craft beautiful, exciting food from a set of familiar, accessible ingredients is a cook’s dream.

Links below go to a buying guide for that ingredient.

Fish sauce

Soy sauce

Oyster sauce

Shaoxing rice wine

Maggi Seasoning Sauce or Bragg Liquid Aminos

Hoisin sauce

Sichuan fermented chile bean sauce/paste (doubanjiang)

Vinegar (apple cider, unseasoned rice, distilled white, Chinkiang)

Hot Sauce (chile-garlic sauce, Thai sriracha, or Viet chile sauce)

Neutral oil (canola, peanut, sunflower, or grapeseed)

Toasted sesame oil