6 New Ingredients You Probably Haven't Tried
By Nicola Lando
-
November 1st, 2019
-
Now you can make blue corn tortillas! The blue cornflour isn't just a different colour to normal masa harina, it also has a different flavour. Serve blue tortillas Mexican streetfood style with cuitlacoche & courgette or squash flowers.
Made from the juice of unripe and unfermented grapes, this verjuice is sweet and floral, with a very gentle acidity - use when lemon juice or vinegar might be too tart. This makes the verjuice a great ingredient for deglazing pans, or introducing a little acidity to cut through a rich sauce.
A favourite of Modernist chefs, N-Zorbit lets you make instant ‘soils’. It’s famous as an ingredient in kombu, anchovy & grapeseed oil sand for Heston Blumenthal’s Sound of the Sea. Though perhaps start off with making peanut butter powder, or olive oil soil.
China’s Sichuan pepper gives your mouth an icy ‘prickle’ sensation – and this infused oil intensifies it! Drizzle over Chinese dishes, experiment with a tiny dash over seafood, or even shaken in a cocktail.
Japan’s umeboshi plums bring a salty sour kick to your cooking. So loved in Japan, they were eaten to restore a Samurai’s strength after battle. During the day, we add a dot of umeboshi paste to onigiri rice balls. And in the evenings we love a dash stirred into a gin Collins cocktail.
Yes, insects are edible. And with a staggering 69% protein, you could say these crickets are a superfood! Sprinkle over tacos or guacamole, or even carrots with hummous a wholesome snack.
About the author
Nicola is co-founder and CEO at Sous Chef. She has worked in food for over ten years.
Nicola first explored cooking as a career when training at Leiths, before spending the next decade in Finance. However... after a stage as a chef at a London Michelin-starred restaurant, Nicola saw the incredible ingredients available only to chefs. And wanted access to them herself. So Sous Chef was born.
Today, Nicola is ingredients buyer and a recipe writer at Sous Chef. She frequently travels internationally to food fairs, and to meet producers. Her cookbook library is vast, and her knowledge of the storecupboard is unrivalled. She tastes thousands of ingredients every year, to select only the best to stock at Sous Chef.
Nicola shares her knowledge of ingredients and writes recipes to showcase those products. Learning from Sous Chef's suppliers and her travels, Nicola writes many of the recipes on the Sous Chef website. Nicola's recipes are big on flavour, where the ingredients truly shine (although that's from someone who cooks for hours each day - so they're rarely tray-bakes!).
