New Loon Moon

9 Gerrard Street
London W1
020 7734 3887

The New Loon Moon is one of Gerrard Street's three Asian supermarkets: the others are Oriental Delight and the enormous Loon Fung. The New Loon Moon's distinguishing feature is that it stocks groceries from a huge range of Asian countries: China, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, India, the Philippines, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and even a tiny selection of Burmese goods. It has an interesting selection of fresh Thai herbs, including holy basil and pea aubergines, and lots of tropical fruit and vegetables including, on this visit, lurid pink dragonfruit, and the biggest jackfruit I had ever seen - about two feet long by a foot and a half wide, covered in spikes, and being sold by the slice.

I bought shrimp paste, Burmese dry balachaung, and a packet of Chinese instant honey and ginger drink (sweet and warming if you have a cold or an upset stomach).

The other supermarkets are worth checking out too. Oriental Delight is a treasure house of luridly packaged Chinese and Japanese snack foods. Get your chocolate-filled koalas, Hello Kitty biscuit tins and green tea flavoured Pocky here, as well as a dubious-looking tubular snack called Chocolate Flavoured Collon.

The Loon Fung has a vast range of mostly Chinese food, although there are small Thai and Indian sections as well; it also has a big meat and (frozen) fish department, where you can buy beef thinly pre-sliced to cook in a 'steamboat' stockpot, and every conceivable part of a pig or cow, including oxtail, trotters and ears. It also stocks a big range of pre-cooked dim sum, fresh noodles and buns.

Gerrard Street is the heart of London's Chinatown, at least at present (it's currently threatened by rising rents and redevelopment). As well as the New Loon Moon, Oriental Delight and the Loon Fung there are about a dozen Chinese restaurants and three bakeries: the Golden Gate Bakery, which had set up a stand outside making tiny waffles and selling them by the dozen when I was passing; the Kowloon bakery which does great pork buns and moon cakes; and the Wonderful Patisserie, whose window is a riot of elaborate cream cakes covered in fruit (the most startling were raspberry tarts with what appeared to be leopardskin patterned icing).


Ingredient 2: Shrimp paste (belacan, blacang, trassie) and Burmese dry balachaung


Shrimp paste is a gamey-smelling condiment used across south east Asia. It's a fermented paste of salted shrimp, which looks and tastes a bit like a dark brown cross between Gentleman's Relish and a stock cube. The brand I have previously bought was called Shrimp and Boy, and came in wonderfully retro packaging depicting a small rosy Chinese child, wreathed in lotuses, astride a large shrimp. This time I bought the rather less fancifully-packaged Trachang brand shrimp paste from Thailand. It's an essential component of all Thai curries, and can add salt and flavour to all kinds of dishes.

I also bought a related condiment, Chinthe brand Burmese dry balachaung. This is a crunchy, spicy mixture of fried onions, garlic, chilli and dried shrimp, with a texture slightly reminiscent of very finely ground Bombay mix. It's delicious sprinkled over stir-fried greens. The jar - which shows that it's manufactured in London - recommends using it as an accompaniment for rice or curry dishes, and adds: "Use as a sandwich filler or spread on hot buttered toast!" I've tried it in sandwiches: they're right.



Recipe: Makeua oop

This recipe is adapted from Hot sour salty sweet: a culinary journey through south east Asia, by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. is a wonderful book which looks at south east Asian cooking by regional style rather than by political boundaries. The recipe caught my eye originally because they called it The best eggplant dish ever. I think they may be right. It's a recipe from the Shan States of Burma: oop is the name of the cooking style, and means that the dish has been steamed without water in a pot with a tight-fitting lid.

This version mutated partly because I misread it the first time I cooked it, and used shrimp paste instead of dried shrimp. Other features of my rather more slapdash cooking include the use of an onion, instead of shallots - by the time you've cooked anything in a paste including belacan, the chances of telling the difference between onion and shallots are small, in my opinion.
Anyway, as I cook it: soak three dried chillis in warm water (you can buy these in large bags from Chinese supermarkets, or you can do as I do and buy fresh ones and use them up when they've wizened on the kitchen window sill). Chop an onion and some garlic (Alford and Duguid suggest five cloves - I sometimes use more). Pound the onion, garlic, and chillis into a paste with a teaspoonful of salt and a tablespoonful of belacan - you can use a mortar or a food processor. Take a few ounces of minced pork - they recommend a quarter cup, I tend to use a bit more. The main thing is that the meat is a frugal seasoning rather than the main ingredient.

Brown the meat in a little oil, then add half a teaspoonful of turmeric and the onion, shrimp and chilli paste. Fry this for a few minutes, and then add some thinly sliced aubergines - cut to about a quarter inch thick . I used four enormous Spanish ones this time. I've tried it with the smaller and more delicate-looking Asian aubergines, but the end result was exactly the same.

Then clamp the lid on the pot, turn the heat reasonably low, check it and stir it every five to ten minutes, and cook it until, as Alford and Duguid say, "the eggplant is very tender and shapeless." You end up with a potent and intensely flavoured brown stew. I served it with rice, and steamed kale sprinkled with the Burmese dry balachaung, but it works pretty well in sandwiches too.

I keep meaning to try the oop technique for other moist vegetables - I think mushroom or okra oop would also work well.

Yaşar Halim

495 Green Lanes, London N4
020 8340 8090

Yaşar Halim is a north London institution - a Turkish Cypriot supermarket, greengrocer's and bakery with a huge range of Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, middle eastern and Iranian produce. It's the highlight of a mile or so of Turkish, Kurdish and Greek restaurants and shops stretching north along Green Lanes from Manor House tube station. It's been featured in articles on 100 Food Shops You Must See Before You Die and nominated for Local Food Hero awards year after year. What better place to start a year of 52 ingredients?

At 4 pm on New Year's Eve it was buzzing. I bought big bundles of fresh flat-leaved parsley, coriander and dill for 59p each, three pomegranates for a pound, lemons, coarse bulghur (pilavlık bulgur), brined green olives stuffed with almonds, and pomegranate syrup (also known as pomegranate molasses - nar ekşisi in Turkish). I bought the Sera brand, which is Turkish, and compared it to the remains of a bottle of Lebanese Cortas brand. Both were good: the Cortas was a little darker and more acid, the Sera very slightly sweeter and thinner.

I also bought some flaked Turkish chilli, pul biber, labelled misleadingly in English as red pepper flakes, and also sometimes known as Aleppo pepper. It's a delicious dark red chilli, mild enough to scatter over food, with a slightly salty smoky taste. It is often provided in dishes on tables in Kurdish cafes in London, so that you can season your food to taste. It may get an entry of its own at some stage this year.

Finally I went next door to the Yaşar Halim's bakery, and came away with Turkish bread sprinkled with sesame seeds (a bit like a thicker variety of barbari nan), mysterious cheese buns flavoured with sesame, raisins and thyme, and big square fried pastries filled with custard and sprinkled with icing sugar.

Ingredient 1: Pomegranate (punica granatum)

Pomegranates are going to be the first of the 52 ingredients. They may be the only fruit to have a city named after them (Granada in Spain), and a weapon (grenade).

The main thing you need to know about pomegranates is that it is possible to get the seeds out without ending up covered in gore, with a bowlful of mangled seeds and pith. My thanks to the cookery writer Diana Henry: it was her book Crazy water, pickled lemons which taught me that eating pomegranates didn't have to be a bloodbath.

Cut the pomegranate in half. Hold it over a bowl, cut side down, and whack it hard with a heavy spoon. The seeds will rain into the bowl, unbroken. A bit of the acrid cream-coloured pith will also fall in, but not very much - you can pick it out at the end.

Pomegranate salad

I used the pomegranate seeds and syrup in a tabbouleh-like salad inspired by Diana Henry's recipe for Salad of middle eastern grilled chicken, bulghur wheat and pomegranates from Crazy water, pickled lemons. I soaked the bulghur in stock until it swelled up: it's particularly good if you have real chicken or vegetable stock, but this was Marigold instant. I mixed it with a lot of finely chopped parsley and coriander, a chopped and sauted onion and some sauted garlic, and some walnuts dry-roasted in a frying pan and broken up gently (this seems to work better than chopping them - you get less skin and shrapnel). Then I stirred in most of the pomegranate seeds and left the flavours to merge.

The dressing was a mixture of pomegranate syrup and olive oil, lemon juice and a little honey - it can be quite sour and hot, because the bulk of the bulghur and herbs soaks it up. I finished with a final sprinkle of pomegranate seeds.

This works very well with chicken - Diana Henry suggests marinading the chicken in a mixture of pomegranate syrup, olive oil, runny honey, cumin and garlic. A vegetarian version of the salad with chopped feta is also good. It's a flexible salad - you can make it very light by going heavy on the herbs and not using much bulghur, or make it solid and filling with a lot of bulghur.

So what's this blog for?

Why 52 Ingredients?
I'm aiming to buy, photograph and cook with one ingredient a week for a year. After that, we'll see.

Why London?
That's where I live: London, England. I hope there will be occasional postcards from other places.

Where do the ingredients come from?
The blog was originally conceived as a tribute to local 'ethnic' shops, which in my part of north London are very good and incredibly varied. Gradually, I hope to explore further afield, and also to explore specialist shops, farmers' markets and street markets, community gardens, and sources of wild food. I want the focus to stay, however, not on the specialist 'foodie' shops - which are already well-documented - but on what you might do with that enigmatic vegetable or monolingually-labelled packet of stuff you brought back from the Turkish/Vietnamese/Colombian/Polish/Mauritian/wherever shop at the end of the road.

Why haven't you mentioned my favourite shop/ingredient/recipe?
I do this for fun. I have a full-time day job, totally unconnected to food. Please email me and tell me about these shops/ingredients/recipes, though. I'd love to hear about them, and I'll do my best to explore them, money and time permitting. If I use the information you send me, I'll happily credit you.

What about the environmental implications of all this food from abroad?
I'm interested in locally-sourced food, and minimising the food miles of what I eat: but it's not the main focus of this blog. Wherever possible, I will try to discuss the provenance of the ingredients I find. A surprising amount of it - apart from spices, obviously - is, or can be, produced in the UK. Or at least within reasonable striking distance of it. They're growing bitter gourds at Spitalfields City Farm and tea in Cornwall, so who knows what's possible? Besides, spices and seasonings have been traded for millennia. The history and politics of how they reach the British Isles is fascinating. Ginger, for instance, imported from China or India, has been used in Britain since Roman times. Food isn't just about nutrition: it's also about tradition, familiarity, celebration, nostalgia. Unusual ingredients have also always been a way of adding flavour and distinctiveness to a frequently limited diet. It's safe to assume that when I'm not buying one weird thing a week to cook I'm eating from a very ordinary range of common British fruit, vegetables and meat.

Why are you writing about an ingredient I consider to be incredibly common and ordinary?
Fortunately, the world is not yet homogenised out of existence. Just because you can buy taro, ortaniques, or roc's eggs on every street corner where you live doesn't mean I can. If you have suggestions for how to cook the things I buy, please email me: I'm always glad of recipes or suggestions.

Don't you have any nice ordinary recipes?
Most of the things I plan to cook are ordinary for somebody, somewhere, including an awful lot of Londoners. However, if you're looking for roasting times for lamb or the best macaroni cheese recipe ever, you've come to the wrong place.