Local Food Around the World!
Note: This is a working page designed to be interactive, so if you have always wanted to ask a question about Indian food, then I can ask a local for you! Do this using the comments section at the bottom of the page. We will then add this info to the page and produce a comprehensive page for all things related to Indian food.
Why another recipe book surely there are enough?
There are a lot of recipe books on the market that focus on one aspect of cooking e.g. “The best BBQ”, “Top dinners under a fiver”, “100 Thai dishes” etc. Yet there are no recipe books that explore the world’s local dishes that people actually eat and like. Every recipe here has come as a result of asking local people one simple question;
“What is the main local dish here that you love to eat?”
Recipe books tend to focus on the (generally a chef’s) personal preference as opposed to what people really like to eat themselves. We want to collate real dishes, eaten by real people from many different countries to give you an eclectic mix of the dishes you must try so you can say that you understand the food that people eat around the world.
Great food means great ingredients:
The key to great food is using the best ingredients. The trouble with recreating dishes from around the world is that the ingredients used are of a massively varied quality. Some ingredients are not available in your home country or have travelled a long distance to get there, thus affecting their shelf life and degree of freshness.
Fruit and vegetables grown in the tropics tend to be grown more organically and with more exposure to natural sunlight, as opposed to in greenhouses locally using un natural light, higher levels of growth agents, pesticides etc, according to the local standards of growing food. More exotic ingredients that cannot be grown locally tend to be picked before they are ripe and ripen in the dark when shipped to your home country. These and more factors contribute to the difference in the overall flavour of a dish when cooked.
As a result the best practice is to enquire when the items you are purchasing has arrived, any sell buy/ use buy dates, where the ingredients originated etc. Depending on the item the sooner ingredients are purchased after they have arrived the better. Items like spices are less affected by shipping than fresh fruit and vegetables and so buying spices that originated in the same country as the dish is likely to produce better results.
If you live in a sunny climate or it is summer in more temperate climate then buying fruit and vegetables when they are fresher, but not yet ripe is the best bet, as you can then let them ripen in the sun. This will produce a better flavour than purchasing items that have ripened on a shelf in a shop or supermarket.
For now here are some foodie pictures to date while we add actual recipes and all things relating to food across the globe from a local’s perspective- not that from a recipe book!
Links for each country will appear gradually below:
India
What do you mean by….?
Measurements:
We have opted to measure things in both millilitres and cups. A cup is ultimately a normal sized tea cup, when filled to the brim it contains 200 ml liquid.
Diced: Cut into cubes less than 1/2cm in thickness
Sliced: cut so the pieces are 1/2cm wide
Finely sliced: Cut between 1 and 2mm wide
Cubed: Cut into squares 1cm by 1cm to form cubes (as even as possible!)
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