You're shopping at an ethnic grocery store and encounter an unfamiliar vegetable, spice, or other food. Do you: a) hardly notice it – why buy something if you don't know what it is?, b) feel intrigued but walk away, perhaps a little mournful of your ignorance, or c) throw it in your basket – this is what you live for! If you answered a or b, read on for some tips. If you answered c, share your experiences and advice with us!
For many of us, finding and learning about unfamiliar ingredients is one of life's joys. We can't resist popping into a Russian, Thai, or other ethnic market to discover new foods and flavors. But it can be intimidating if you don't speak or read the language. Certain foods might not even be labeled, and others are organized around the store in a way that's unclear. Here are some of our strategies for dealing with unfamiliar items. We hope you'll share your own thoughts in the comments.
• Ask – If store employees don't seem particularly open to questions (though we do suggest trying; it gets easier and less intimidating the more you do it!), ask another shopper for advice. Even if they can't tell you what it's called in English, they might be able to offer cooking tips.
• Look for context clues – This is less helpful for produce, but when it comes to condiments or canned goods, can you identify anything else around it? Is it grouped with sweet, spicy, or salty foods? This might offer clues for cooking as well as research.
• Do some research – Often times we just buy the food and do the research afterward. Or we'll hold off but jot down the name or even snap a cellphone picture check our reference sources at home or the library. Google is of course a useful tool, but we also turn to books such as Food Plants of the World, Asian Ingredients, The Indian Grocery Store Demystified, Latin & Caribbean Grocery Stores Demystified, and The Contemporary Encyclopedia of Herbs & Spices, not to mention ethnic cookbooks. Online, we might research ingredients on sites like Cook's Thesaurus, Asia Recipe, and Ethnic Foods Co. (terrible to navigate but sometimes useful).
• Post a photo on Flickr – There are countless Flickr groups for ethnic cuisines, fruits and vegetables, spices, etc. Post a photo and ask people for help identifying it.
• Buy it and have someone else be the guinea pig – This can be a good strategy if you're vegetarian or have food sensitivities or dislikes. Just be sure you partner with someone who has well-developed and trustworthy taste buds!
• Buy it, experiment, and accept the mystery – Perhaps you'll never know the name of that herb or what that sauce should "really" be used for, but that's okay. Give it a try and think of it as an adventure!
Finally, if you're really stumped, you can always ask us and perhaps we, or our readers, will know the answer.
Related:
5 Tips On Finding The Best Products At Ethnic Markets
How Can I Identify Ingredients At the Ethiopian Market?
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If you have an Android phone, try the app "Google Goggles". You take a picture of an item/object/landmark and it analyzes the picture and does a google search that can be uncannily accurate.
Example: just pulled down my little box of Yama moto Yama Genmai-cha. Took a picture, the top search hit is for the Yama moto Yama company website, next 4 all vendors selling the tea or reviewing it.
Great advice. I love the adventure of shopping in ethnic markets.
Some of the ethnic-themed blogs have sections on staples, pantry items, and lexicons of the ingredients that are unique to the culture.
A favorite of mine - for Japanese is the excellent sites that Makiko runs: justbento.com and justhungry.com. Maki has a wealth of good information that she presents as 'handbooks.'
ill agree with #1 too, and just throw out sometimes its worth it to go out of your way if you know of a market with a particularly friendly or helpful owner/employees. We frequent an indian grocery that is in another town because the owner is very helpful and honest. He will recommend a better product or even a better deal, and has given us many small free things to try and even some cooking advice.
Another good thing to do is use your friends. My boyfriend is indian and although raised mostly in the west he is familiar with a lot of products and has introduced me to many. We have taken friends shopping with us before and share our own knowledge on what items/brands we love and how to use them.
Thanks for the app suggestion dwhitman, that sounds pretty amazing.
Shop with a knowledgeable friend. I never mind helping someone out with Asian-based ingredients and I have a friend who does the same for Russian foods.
And don't stereotype who might help you! A Chinese shopkeeper introduced me to Ajvar (Eastern European pepper & eggplant spread).
http://www.thaifoodandtravel.com/brands.html
I found this list of recommendations for thai food ingredients very helpful...
I am an Asian and now studying in German. I really pity German people that really have a hard time to understand what are they looking for at the shelves.
I do this all the time. I either ask the shopkeeper how to cook it (if its a vegetable or fruit), and later Wikipedia it, or just follow directions on a box.
Those "X Grocery Store Demystified" books are great! But not 100% thorough.
I look at the list of ingredients. There's usually a tiny sticker placed on foreign packages with ingredients in English. You may not exactly know what you're getting, but you can look out for ingredients you don't like. (Fish in my case.)
I always try to look at the price tag underneath the item, it's almost always in English! Google, and then done!
I've got a translator app on my iPhone. I never thought to use it for this, but I guess it would come in handy for foods packaged in foreign languages.
About every other time I go to the grocery store I try to buy something that I've never tried before. It just became a lot easier since i moved to Hong Kong a few months ago. There have been some pretty terrible foods that way, but also some great finds!
as long as i don't spend a mint, if the packaging is intriguing enough, i'll buy one of anything. i've found some great things this way (muscadine-flavored gummies and chile-lime-mango sourstraws turned out to be keepers) though it does make the candy jar at my desk a roulette for everyone else (some of the candy with the shrimp print on the wrapper had chocolate. some had shrimp and chocolate).
My sister & I make a habit of going to ethnic markets together picking the strangest looking food item & purchasing it for the other one to eat.
I'm on a strict budget and have certain food sensitivities, so if I see something interesting, I write down the name and brand, then look up what it is, the ingredients, and how to use it when I get home, then I plan it into the next week's meals. Also, this is why you will always find a box of Annie's gluten-free mac & cheese in our cabinet. It's our 'disaster-meal' back up!
I buy it and figure it out later. I have to be careful with certain things because I can't eat gluten, but other than that, I research it later. I'm actually really bad about impulse buying exotic ingredients.
After living in what might be considered the Little Vietnam and Little Ethiopia of San Diego, I have taken a very relaxed approach to shopping in ethnic markets. I just look at the picture or the product itself. "Does this look like something I would like to put in my mouth?" "Yes." In the basket, it goes. Ethnic markets tend to be less expensive than regular grocery stores, so I don't feel bad if I get something I don't like. I've also been know to save empty packages of things l did like so I can take them back to the store to compare words and ingredients. I like this sort of "guess and check" approach a lot more than just using my iPhone or Wiki. It puts the adventure in cooking and eating.
Those "Grocery Store Demystified" books are frustratingly bad. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the publisher put them out without an index. It makes them nearly-impossible to use as a resource -- in order to figure out what a particular fruit you find in the market is called, you have to read the entire chapter on fruit. Some things are illustrated and some aren't. It's nothing you could bring with you as a reference.