Asian Food Hacks
How to make your food tastes like home
Food hacks to satisfy your Asian taste buds
If you are an expat from Asia living in a European country, chances are you face this challenge every day. If you do not cook, this might have become worse. Here are a few tips and tricks that I use to get familiar flavours from the food or recipes available.
Buy the Pizza base, make your own topping
When we first moved here, one of the few things we brought from the supermarket was frozen pizza. However, we were thoroughly disappointed with the flavours. We also didn't want to make a full effort of making the dough and starting our pizza from scratch. The best compromise we found was to make the pizza topping and then use it on a store brought pizza base.
If you do not want to cook, and want to order Papa John’s or Dominos, always customise your toppings to remove what you don’t like and make it to your taste. This sounds trivial, I know. But we were so used to get the pizzas as they were, so this was a big change for us.
Add Tumeric and chilli powder to the recipes
When I get tired or bored of cooking rice and curries I venture into finding other recipes on the internet. But most of them end up in disappointment as they taste bland to my taste buds who crave spicy food. One of the hacks I do is follow these recipes with my own twist.
I use Hello Fresh because it makes my life easy and gives me a chance to cook new recipes every week. However, when I cook them I often change them, so they end up the way I want. A lot of recipes start from frying chicken (or meat of your preference) with salt and pepper. I usually season the chicken with salt, pepper, Tumeric and chilli powder before frying. So they do end up with the flavours I want. I do this for most of the chicken recipes I find online.
Chillie flakes is another lifesaver you can use especially in recipes like white sauce pasta, where you still want that creamy flavour but still need a little bit of a boost.
Use fresh ingredients like curry leaves
If you are coming from a food culture where curry leaves and/or pandan leaves is a must for everything you make, you might find it very difficult to find them in the UK and the ones you find are very expensive and you don’t want to buy bulk and throw most of it away when they go bad. We all have to agree that the dried ones don't give the same aroma or taste.
In this case, you can buy them in bulk and prepare them to refrigerate so that you can use them for months. One of the first things that I do, when I buy my curry leaves and pandan leaves is to wash them and dry them. Once they are completely dry, I divide them into batches. Then I wrap them in kitchen papers and put them in freezer bags. Then I squeeze the air out of them and seal them and put them in the fridge (not the freezer). By using this method you can keep them fresh for some time. You can also put them in 1 or 2 Tbsp of oil (I use olive oil) and put them in a sealed container in the fridge. The leaves stayed fresh but since they were in oil, they are messy to use, so I went back to the previous method. If you want to try, buy a small amount and try these two methods and work out what you like before committing to a large batch.
Do not use supermarket spices
You have probably seen the 1 pound spice bottles in your local supermarket. If you are not a frequent cook, these might be good. But if you are planning to cook regularly, these are not worth it. They are expensive as well as you will not get the same taste. If you run out of the spices that you brought from your home country (don’t deny this, I know everyone does this), try a shop or online retailer with Asian ingredients and buy bulk. It will be cost-effective as well as taste good.
Salt, Pepper, and Chillie Flakes save the day
If you are eating out in a cafe or restaurant, always keep the salt and pepper shakers near. Not all establishments have chilli flakes. But if they have them, that is even better. If you are getting a takeaway and not eating at home, where you will have them at hand, ask for few more sachets of salt and pepper, they will definitely help you to get the flavours a little bit tolerable.
Bonus: Where to buy ingredients online?
Here are a few of the online retailers that I have used and trust. If you still do not have a preferred retailer, give one of them a try and see.
If you want cooked food, try these
Bonus recipe twist
If you love experimenting with new recipes, try this focaccia recipe, but change the topping to the one below
Topping:
Instead of Rosemary, use Curry leaves and add chilli flakes, chilli powder, chopped shallots and chopped green chillies. Keep the other stuff like olive oil and salt the same.
