Whether you’re an experienced cook or just starting to dabble in the kitchen, having the right ingredients in your cupboard is key to making the right dishes flavourful. East Asian cuisine has long been popular with international audiences with distinctive cooking styles and components.
East Asian cuisine has a multitude of flavour profiles and ingredients to stock up on. South Africa has a sizable East and South Asian population, and this has heavily influenced a lot of our national flavour profiles. We’re so lucky to live in a country with diverse culinary heritage and a variety of dishes (from street food to sweet treats) to choose from.
For Heritage month, we spoke to Ming-Cheau Lin, author of cookbook Just Add Rice and memoir Yellow and Confused. Food is not only part of her heritage but also tradition, as her family has a long history in food service and just launched Lin Family Eats.
In her 2018 cookbook, she delves into Taiwanese cuisine, her South African roots and some of the must-have pantry items to create these dishes.
Can you share 5 ingredients that are integral to Taiwanese cuisine and why you love them?
I have a list of 10 in Just Add Rice, but if you force my hand… it would be soy sauce, sticky sweet soy sauce, white pepper, rice vinegar and toasted white sesame oil. These are pretty useful for basic marinades and sauces that shout Taiwanese street food.
What mistakes do people make when trying to attempt different East Asian recipes?
There is such a big variety of styles and ingredients depending on which area you come from, so lumping everything under ‘Asian’ without more understanding creates a disconnect to its origins. I feel doing simple research on recipes or ingredients origins adds great value when making the dish.
What’s the dish you gravitate towards the most?
I will always find a reason to make pancakes, there’s a recipe in my cookbook that’s based off a Taiwanese street food snack. My papa’s mother was a street food vendor and sold these puffy pancakes that sandwich sugar and crushed toasted peanuts.
And finally, what’s the one ingredient or tool you can’t live without?
A small cleaver my folks got me when I was in college. It’s nothing fancy, and has been sharpened so much it looks vastly different from it’s original form, but think general chopping, slicing, pressing of garlic… it’s my favourite tool to work with.
