Experiments in weird ass ingredients

[MadJohnShaft]

I have access to the local middle eastern and former soviet union republics grocery store zones.

The first is the 5 miles of weird ethnic businesses on Devon Ave and the second is the couple miles of weird ethnic businesses that opened up to replace the out-of-business-bad-economy lost businesses on Dempster Ave.   All have shiny things in the windows and hookahs for sale.

First up?  The Iranian place.  Iranian men enjoying cigarettes outside and yelling about things inside.


I am about to cook something that may have a non-culinary purpose?

I asked the guy twice what they were, then became embarrassed enough not to ask a third time what the fuck these things in a bag were all about, cause I couldn't understand a word he was saying.

Googling at home? Dried limes!  They are earthy, bitter and citrus flavored, maybe even a little fermented.  Used in Iranian cooking. With lentils so far so good. Also, Iranian recipes give me a use for that damn fenugreek.  Maybe with mint, so there's a way to use all that mint from outside too. And all those damn lentils.

Also, free Palestine!  There's a krzykistani place up next. My name-ah Borat.

[khoomeizhi]

i'm a fan of the stuff they call poha that they sell at the indian groceries on devon. got a few-years supply last time i was through. basically flattened rice that you rehydrate a bit and throw into stir-fries and such. super-fast carb source for when cooking needs to be fast.

but weird-ass ingredients - story of my life. i grow all kinds of weird perennial vegetables, tubers, and herbs. chinese toon is a tree that you eat the new-growth shoots of in spring, like big leafy oniony greens. weird. oca, the sweet/sour tuber-forming oxalis...yacon, ground plum, groundnut, skirret...or the gundru (fermented greens) or kishk (fermented grain & yogurt)....

[MadJohnShaft]

Poha it is. noted.

I want to pick up some sumac too, I wonder if I could just pick the wild stuff?


This shit's growing all over the damn place




Maybe I should try to be nicer to the staff? We have employees from the whole planet, lots of people from the Stans and Middle East and Asia, that should have me and Julia over for dinner or invite to their weddings.  We went to a Pakistani one and had too hot to eat samosas and an Assyrian one and had lots of grilled and kabobed meats.

[James1214]

I wouldn't pick wild sumac as there are some species which are poisonous. sometimes the leaves are the poisonous part sometimes the berries. the toxicity can also vary greatly between species.  also sumac used in middle eastern cooking is dried and ground which would be a pain in the ass to do at home unless you had experience. I would reccomend getting some when u get the chance, it is a flavor that just makes sense when you taste it and is one of those " that's what my kebabs/humus/tagine /schwarma was missing" kind of ingredients.

[MadJohnShaft]

Vegeta?




Vegeta is a condiment which is a mixture of spices and various vegetables invented in 1959 by a Bosnian Croat scientist Zlata Bartl, and has become a product sold worldwide.

Vegeta is produced by Podravka, a company from Koprivnica, Croatia, as well as a subsidiary of Podravka in Poland[1] and two Vegeta licensees from Austria and Hungary. There have been around 50 instances of other companies attempting to reproduce the product.

The ingredients of Vegeta include (according to the 2008 product packaging):

    salt max. 56%
    dehydrated vegetables 15.5 % (carrot, parsnip, onions, celery, parsley leaves)
    flavour enhancers (monosodium glutamate max. 15%, disodium inosinate)
    sugar
    spices
    cornstarch
    riboflavin (for coloring)

Average contents of 100 g of Vegeta Energetic value    583 kJ (137 kcal)
Protein    8.5 g
Carbohydrate    24.5 g
Fat    0.6 g

Vegeta was conceived in 1958 in Podravka's laboratories and professor Zlata Bartl was head of the team that invented it.[1] The product was first sold in Yugoslavia in 1959 as "Vegeta 40",[1] and has since become so popular that the production increased by several orders of magnitude[citation needed]. In 1967 Vegeta was first exported to Hungary and the USSR[1] and is now sold in around 40 countries worldwide.[1]

[RAGER]

Good thread.

[Lumpy]

If you make a lot of sandwiches, get some Ajvar (eye-var). It's a red pepper spread (not spicy, but zesty...? Tang?)



People put it on crackers too, but come on... how many people here eat crackers. Sandwiches FTW. The Bosnians like it, and I think the Poles like it too. Probably an all-over Eastern Europe type of thing.

[MadJohnShaft]

Occurs to me I have about $70 left of an Amazon gift card balance and could just order all this shit.



Stumbled on the Albini food blog (RAGER quality efforts there) googling for this item



Lu hing mui - Hawaii salted dried plum

Li hing mui is salty dried plum. It was made popular in Hawaii by Yee Sheong, who in early 1900, had began importing Li hing mui and various other preserved fruits from China to Hawaii. The Li Hing Mui craze was started by Yee and flourished with the company he founded, Yick Lung. It can be found in Hawaiian and Asian markets. It has a strong, distinctive flavor, and is often said to be an acquired taste, as it has a combination of sweet, sour, and salty taste. It has also been described as tart, and even tangy. Originally from China, the name "li hing mui" means "traveling plum". "Li hing" is "traveling" and "mui" is "plum

[NCR600]

i'm a fan of the stuff they call poha that they sell at the indian groceries on devon. got a few-years supply last time i was through. basically flattened rice that you rehydrate a bit and throw into stir-fries and such. super-fast carb source for when cooking needs to be fast.

Gonna look for this when I hit the Indian grocer this weekend. Need to do a bulk spice/incense/cheap pots buy-up.

Some of the Sumac family trees rhus are as toxic as hell and will bring up a nasty blistered rash if you touch them. I think that the sap from one type is used as a shellac style varnish in Japanese and Korean cabinet making. I'm cool to collect and eat nettles, but I'd stay the hell away from any of the rhus family unless you know exactly which variety it is.

[khoomeizhi]

eastern us, the only bad rhus is poison ivy that's at all common. staghorn sumac is easy as hell to identify, and makes a damn fine pink lemonade. haven't tried drying some for spice, but it should be pretty straightforward.

note: been IDing trees etc since i was a kid and did it academically for a while too, so there's that. but staghorn sumac is a good accessible wild edible. i collect it every year.

[MadJohnShaft]

My neighbor when I was a kid became a naturalist as they said in the 70s when he retired fairly well off and laid out the 1200 miles of ice age trails in WI  - anyway, he was a hardcore gardener and so was my Dad and since he was always in the woods, he knew when all the wild patches of eatables were about to come due - he would bring Dad and me up there and we'd come back with buckets of asparagus, blue berries, raspberries, wild strawberries, choke cherries, black raspberries, the list goes on and on...  But there was for sure some easily ID'd sumac in there.

!

[mortlock]

i ate a dorito and mayo on white bread sandwich once..it was awesome..

[MadJohnShaft]

I went to the pice house and got Sumac powder, Mexican oregano, espresso powder, juniper berries, blue cheese powder, rose water

[khoomeizhi]

which pice house be that?

blue cheese powder? sounds a lot like the kishk i make, at least taste/aroma wise. you can make some kickass super deep/rich soup, frying some in butter to start them flavors bloomin'

[MadJohnShaft]

Spice house has samplers of everything.


Blue Cheese powder for popcorn. Yes!

[Volume]

I picked some spruce shoots yesterday and I thought I'd make some snaps and syrup.



The bottle on the left is just vodka and spruce shoots. In a month or so I'll filter it and add some sugar and a week or two after that it should be done. The rest are basically sugar and spruce shoots. You let them sit in a sunny window, shake the bottles every once in a while and in a month you should have a nice syrup.

[lonely lady]

F

[MadJohnShaft]

No

[khoomeizhi]

not necessarily an 'ingredient', but i just wanted to report that eggfruit are pretty fucking weird. but also good. when they're ripe, the flesh is like sweet, dense cake with the texture of a very hard-cooked egg yolk. relatively high in fat, also like cake & eggs.

[mertzy]

I'm intrigued

[khoomeizhi]

(i planted the two large seeds)

[mertzy]

I'm going on an egg fruit hunt this weekend for sure.

[deleted account]

this thread reminds me of Chopped, which I've been watching a lot of since I've recently had access to cable TV due to housesitting.

just sayin'

[MikeyT]

Occurs to me I have about $70 left of an Amazon gift card balance and could just order all this shit.


Stumbled on the Albini food blog (RAGER quality efforts there) googling for this item

     Ok, I guess this is what you meant by weird ass ingredients.

[MadJohnShaft]

I went to three of the Devon Ave Indian/Pakistani mega groceries - there's a couple dozen in all - that's worth a visit to our fine city.  They service the restaurants on the same block so you can buy things by the kilo.  I found that Poha flat rice and then some.


My favorite South American grocery, with a restaurant in the back, is La Unica.  I love that place.  They have Yerba Mate, blue corn, Aji Amarillo.... And a damn butcher.

http://chicago.menupages.com/restaurants/la-unica/