I feel like reverse engineering substitutes and basic concepts out of doing a lot of recipes sucks ass. How do you do this better, preferrably without getting someone from that region to teach you because where I live is not that kind of melting pot
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rednote has been strangely good on this for me and tiktok used to be also.
they have tons of creators that show you how they cook their food and i’ve applying some of it in my (mostly failed) attempts at adopting a vegan diet; particularly the northern indian, cantonese, and latin american creators
I feel like reverse engineering substitutes and basic concepts out of doing a lot of recipes sucks ass.
I sadly don’t really think there’s any other way of doing it. I don’t really know of any books or YouTube channels that actually tell you what the cuisine of a place is like, they all just do individual recipes and don’t tell you what the people in a specific culture actually eat on a day-by-day basis what their most basic recipes are and the like
I don’t know where you are or what types of cuisine you’re interested in trying but I’ve been able to find decent Asian grocery stores pretty much everywhere in the US, Latam, and Europe. Just getting some basic stuff like gochujang, kimchi, mirin, dashi, sichuan peppers, doubanjiang, sesame oil, etc. opens up a TON of fun dishes. I’ve recently been having a blast cooking Japanese food with my girlfriend, mirin and hondashi are really the only things needed to transform local ingredients into quite authentic tasting Japanese dishes. Same principle applies with Korean and Chinese, you only need a few key ingredients and then you can go wild and cook pretty much anything
It’s enough of a melting pot I can find most non-persihables you mentioned easily but then there’s also really no good supply of fresh kimchi, for example. So I’m wondering, for example, with the abundance of sauerkraut here in germany if I were to just add some ingredients does that get close enough, you get me?
I can easily do the equivalent of spaghetti and meatballs, i.e. italo-american, for most of anything and give a local pan fry the japanese / korean / vietnamese spin but it’s still not the cuisine
Making your own kimchi is quite easy! Not sure you’d use enough to justify it but it’s a fun weekend project. It’s basically just fermented cabbage with chili powder, I don’t think mixing spice into already fermented sauerkraut would work well though. If you want suggestions for “proper” dishes you can make with the basics my staples are bibimbap, bokkumbap, mapo tofu, laziji, nikujaga, and Japanese curry. All very easy and certainly representative of KR/CN/JP cuisine (China obv has huge variety but I prefer sichuan dishes)
Find some recipes, read up on techniques and practice
My parents didn’t ever teach me how to cook, so I taught myself
Now people are always inviting me to things because they know I will blow their minds with some amazing food
I made gateau invisible for a get-together last week and it was a hit
Where do you read up on techniques, then? I can read recipes and I’m a fine ass cook as substantiated by lots of people but what I want to learn is "if I were a stereotypical mom or grandma (vietnamese) what do I vietnamesically throw together out of the pantry? What do I even have in the pantry? What do I buy for special occasions because it’s worth the effort (and combine with things out of the pantry of mystery). Or is there even a pantry, does the whole thing kind of work on “go to local fresh market every two days”?
