UK Edition
From amchoor to smoked eel: a cook's guide to unusual ingredients and where to get them
“I feel sorry for that Yotam Ottolenghi,” says my mum. Restaurateur, international best selling author, vegetable hero (plus suave, handsome and likeable to boot), I’m struggling to see why I should feel bad for Yotam. “I heard him on the Food Programme and I think he feels he has to use odd ingredients,” she explains. “Poor chap. I’m sure he’d like to make simple dishes sometimes. I think he could do with some scrambled eggs.”
I usually have to have a lie down once I’ve located everything for one of his recipes. But his fans do expect him to come up with the unusual – it’s become part of his trademark.
My readers, on the other hand, are definitely divided. Half are keen to search out something unfamiliar, the other half groan because it means trying to find a specialist food shop or buying online and paying a delivery fee for one item. I sympathise with those who don’t want the hassle. Even if you love cooking, getting a meal on the table every day (especially if you have a family) is hard enough - without tracking down hibiscus flowers.
Finding and tasting the unusual is, for me, one of the great pleasures of cooking, but even I groaned when I opened my most recent issue of Gourmet Food and Travel (it is an Australian ‘foodie’ magazine, admittedly, but the ingredients they have available aren’t so different to what we can get here with a little effort). In the first article I read – on "new" breakfasts – the list of ingredients included: salted shrimp, nori pear, jasmine and kelp salt (wallaby comes up too, but that is a whole different article).
My first thought was: what's wrong with eggs benedict? Then I recalled what it used to be like. I grew up in rural Northern Ireland where I couldn’t get an avocado until 1987. When I was a teenager, my mum had to make a special order of aubergines at the greengrocer so I could make the exotic dish I’d just read about (ratatouille). These were met, when they arrived, with awe. Purple slippers with soft velvety flesh, we’d never seen or tasted anything like them.
The basic produce – the meat and fish in particular – was of fantastic quality, which is more important than being able to get hold of a bottle of pomegranate molasses. But it was a frustration if you wanted to travel through your cooking, if you wanted to explore tastes beyond your own shores.
When I came to England it was like suddenly having a global food market on my doorstep. I would cross London to get just the right kind of Turkish peppers at Ridley Road market; I went to a small, fairy-light trimmed shop near Baron’s Court to get barberries for Middle Eastern cooking and one near Shepherd’s Bush for chickpea flour to make Provencal socca. I had no children and plenty of time.
Now we don’t even have to leave the house to get the ingredients we need (or the ones that simply pique our interest). This week smoked eel, black cardamom pods, an interesting bottle of bitters and liquorice powder have all been delivered straight to my door. I’m excited about getting some amchoor soon, too. Used in Indian cooking it’s the ground powder of sun-dried mangoes and is described as being "tart but soft, deep and fruity". This sounds too intriguing to resist.
For those of you who love new flavours, here’s a list of the best online places to find the hard-to-track down. To avoid shelling out a delivery cost for one item, make a list over a period of time then order the items from the company that has most of them (it’s usually souschef.co.uk). I confess to flurries of late night ordering that give me the same excitement other women get from shoes and handbags. (A Gucci Dionysus bag? Nah. Give me white truffles, bergamots and the creamiest burrata).
There’s nothing wrong with eating what’s on your doorstep, mind you. Cheddar cheese, British sausages and pies, the best apples and pears and root veg, smoked haddock - we have great stuff, right here. But wouldn’t you like to know what amchoor tastes like?
These are the websites I know and use most, particularly the first four. There isn’t much you can’t find on them.
Best websites for unusual ingredients
There is stuff on here that only a restaurant would order, but for the culinarily curious, this website is heaven. There are very few things you can’t find on it, and you can spend happy hours just trawling through and marveling at the range.
They have Coco Lopez cream of coconut (which is not the same as creamed coconut, or coconut cream, but is used for cocktails), yellow bean sauce, tamarind pulp, Asian sesame paste, squid ink, Italian 00 flour, dried black lime… And plenty of things I’ve never heard of (konnaya noodles? Furikake rice seasoning?) The service is excellent and swift. A very good company.
They describe themselves as a "one-stop online shop for essential and hard to find ingredients" and they do have a massive range (and stock the odd ingredient which I can’t find anywhere else, such as Kurz & Lang’s range of bratwurst).
Spices. All of them
It’s not a sexy looking site but there isn’t a pulse or bean they don’t stock. Currently it’s the only place I can find black beluga lentils. They also have a good range of flours, seeds and dried fruit.
Excellent Spanish produce. Apart from top-notch cured ham they also have jars of luscious white beans from Navarrico, dried baby chickpeas, sobrasada and tinned beech-smoked anchovies
Usually you can find French ingredients quite easily but occasionally I use this site. They have everything you would find in a large French supermarket: confit de canard, Connetable tinned sardines, tinned foie de morue fume and every sirop you can think of.
This is a bit annoying in that the site doesn’t have prices. You need to contact them, they give you login details and then you can order that way. It’s worth the hassle, though. They are total experts. Olive oils (and they do other types of oil too) are listed both by country and by producer.
I get my favourite extra virgin olive oils – Ravida from Sicily and A L’Olivier Black Fruity from France – from here, plus excellent anchoiade, sea salt with wild fennel, saba and fruit vinegars that contain fruit pulp
Not all things Scandinavian are here, but quite a lot of them are! (Ocado also do quite a big range of Scandi stuff now as well). Scandi Kitchen sells mandelmassa, an almond paste that isn’t quite the same as marzipan, Danish syrup (both light and dark) which you need for some Danish bread recipes, Scandinavian mustard, Scandinavian anchovies, fabulous Den Gamle Fabrik raspberry and rhubarb jam, smoked artic char, Scandi cheeses, filmjolk (a kind of thin yoghurt) and blood pudding.
Fabulous crystallised flowers. Particular varieties are only in stock when in season, of course, but they’re quite magical, particularly the wild roses, apple blossom and violas.
Edible flowers. Yes, I do bother to order these sometimes. You can get mixed boxes or specific varieties (borage, nasturtiums or pansies, to name a few). They’re brilliant for big leafy salads, bowls of couscous or, obviously, cakes.
I don’t buy regular drinking wine on this site but it has every liqueur, cordial and syrup you can name, plus fruit purees. Ice cider from Quebec (it’s a dessert wine and is luscious), violet liqueur, Icelandic beer, dry Marsala (which is hard to find), Japanese plum wine, it’s all here.