Cooking with the same old ingredients can get boring but many people are too nervous to try anything new. We’re here to help give you the confidence to try something different. Here are five ingredients which can take your cooking to a new level and inspire you to create new recipes.
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1. Tamarind
Tamarind is a legume like fruit, although you will most often find it sold as a paste or sauce. It has a sweet and sour flavour. You might have never heard of it or used it in a recipe, but you probably have tasted it before even if you didn’t realise it at the time. That’s because tamarind is one of the main ingredients in HP sauce and many other condiments. It is also commonly used as an ingredient in confectionery and sodas outside of the west.
You could try adding tamarind paste to your sauces, stews or curries. You could also spread the paste on meat as part of a marinade, or just put tamarind sauce on chips instead of ketchup. You might be pleasantly surprised.
2. Potato Starch
If you’ve ever enjoyed good-quality Korean fried chicken, then you’ll might have wondered just how they get it so crispy. The answer is potato starch.
Potato starch is similar to corn starch. It has many uses, such as thickening sauces but it also gives an incredibly crispier texture when fried. It’s healthier and easier than making flour, egg, and breadcrumb batter for chicken or fish, and in my opinion it’s actually tastier too.
Try placing a few pieces of chicken thigh in a sandwich bag along with two tablespoons of potato starch and a few spices. Give the bag a shake to coat the chicken. Then fry the chicken in oil or cook in an air fryer until golden brown. If you want them to be extremely crispy you could let the pieces cool after cooking, then toss them in another tablespoon of potato starch and double fry them.
3. Lao Gan Ma Chilli Sauce
Be warned, this one is addictive. Lao Gan Ma crispy chilli sauce is sold in jars at most Asian food stores. You can also find it in some large supermarkets, but they tend to overcharge for it.
Lao Gan Ma sauce is fried chilli flakes and soybeans in chilli oil. It’s incredibly flavourful and a single teaspoon will go quite far. Despite the ingredients, it’s not actually as hot as you might think, especially compared to some western “hot sauces”.
You can use Lao Gan Ma as an ingredient in sauces and marinades or mix it with vinegar and soy sauce to make an amazing dipping sauce for dumplings. My absolute favourite way to use it is to simply add 1-2 teaspoons to a bowl of plain white rice and garnish it with some chopped chives.
There are also other varieties of Lao Gan Ma sauce available with add other flavours to the mix along with chillies. I’d recommend both the black bean version and the fried tofu one.
4. Maize Flour
Maize flour, which is sometimes called PAN flour (after the most well-known brand) is a versatile flour made from corn. You’ll find it used in a lot of Latin and Mesoamerican recipes. You can buy both cooked and uncooked varieties which have slightly different colours, textures and flavours.
My favourite thing to make with maize flour is Arepas, a staple of Venezuelan cuisine. You mix the maize flour with water and salt to make a dough, then shape that dough into flat discs. These are then fried on either side. You can then cut into one side of them to form a pocket. The outside should be crispy, but the inside will be fluffy. You can fill these arepa pockets with cheese, ground beef, chicken, or any other filling you like.
5. MSG
MSG or monosodium glutamate, the name is enough to strike fear into the hearts of some – but honestly, if you’re afraid of MSG, you must also be afraid of KFC, Doritos, and soy sauce, not forgetting fresh tomatoes and mushrooms too – because all those foods contain MSG too. Far from being some industrial chemical or dangerous additive, MSG is simply a crystalised version of glutamate, a naturally occurring substance found in some degree in hundreds of fresh vegetables.
Over the last few decades, there has been something of a moral panic around MSG. But to be clear, just because MSG is often used as an ingredient in unhealthy foods, doesn’t make MSG itself unhealthy. If you make a homemade soup out of fresh summer vegetables, it doesn’t become junk food just because you add a teaspoon of MSG!
MSG has no real flavour on its own but will increase the depth and intensity of other savoury flavours. It makes beef stock taste “beefier”, it makes tomato soup taste more “tomatoey” etc.
It is rare that I cook any kind of sauce that doesn’t use at least a little MSG. Try adding just half a teaspoon the next time you’re making a chilli or stew – you won’t regret it!
Ready to try some new recipes?
Hopefully this list has given you some ideas for how you could use these ingredients to expand your repertoire of recipes. Don’t be afraid to cook outside of your comfort zone. The worst thing that can happen is that you don’t like the food, but then you don’t have to make it again if that’s the case. However, if you like what you make, then you have a new dish you can impress your friends with!