I am an enthusiastic shopper at out local Asian food places. Unfortunately, the upper midwest doesn’t have anything like Ranch 99, and there are no BBQ/baking smaller places, either.
Big fan of the greens. A Choy(cook fast, with salt and Garlic), Yau Choy(less finicky, good stir fried or in soups), Si Lum Choy(Watercress)( dropped in soups, and stir fried...wash extensively), Long Beans, Gai Lan( a bit tougher, but love the taste). Also fresh Water Chestnuts are WAY better than canned. In general, i find the greens to be better and cheaper than at most other food stores.
There are all sorts of Noodles, some very fresh, as well as Tofu, both fried and not. If you can ever find a place that has fresh Tofu, you are in for a pleasant surprise.
Have recently resorted to getting BBQ Pork sauce, and making my own BBQ pork. Costs a fraction of what it costs at a BBQ joint, and tastes just as good. Have also tried BBQ Duck, using my own ingredients, with less success.
My wife is a Durian lover. I like them, too, but they can REALLY stink. The fresh is better than frozen, and the best are usually from Thailand, though true Durian lovers get pretty passionate about the whole subject. Eat them with Mangosteens-they compliment one another. Longans are great, and easy to eat.
Durian is right there, maybe right at the top, of the stink level, along with Taiwanese stinky tofu and Korean doenjang. But interestingly enough, all 3 are delicious.
I have never had durian, but since I don’t like blue cheese (is it a good comparison?! Lol), I will pass that one up on my bucket list.
The other day I saw folks buying young fresh coconut from the Asian market, my curiosity was piqued, (since we buy coconut water/milk a lot), asked them how easy it is to “open” it, they all say very easy.
It was NOT easy (I must have not grasped the technique!). But the juice is very refreshing (small cup of it) and the fresh coconut meat really a treat. Just too hard to get them.
We go to Lotte Market (lotteplaza) where they sell Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indian grocery. They are bigger and more popular than Hmart in our area. I like it for the variety of fruits and vegetables that are not sold in the local markets.
No durian is nothing like blue cheese. It’s sweet, but sort of putrid at the same time. I like stinky tofu, and hairy - we had both in China - also some sort of fermented fish. (I don’t like blue cheese, beets or liver - I’ll eat almost anything else in at least small quantities.)
I kind of believe that I appear in that essay. The author – a fairly successful alt-rock singer-songwriter under the name Japanese Breakfast – shops at the same H Mart I do. The essay mentions white people shopping for galangal root for an Indonesian recipe. As it happens, H Marts do not carry galangal root, but I didn’t know that until l went there about four months before Zauner’s essay was published and searched all over the store for it, in the process asking everyone in the produce aisles who looked like they knew English if they had any idea whether/where I could find galangal root. (The answer turned out to be 12 miles away, at a big, somewhat decrepit, Vietnamese supermarket.)
At my H Mart, trust me, they speak Korean to people (me) who don’t look Asian. There’s usually someone around who is competent in English, but you have to look.
Maybe someone can help me understand why there are 50+ varieties of soy sauce at the H Mart, but only two that don’t have some form of corn syrup as a major ingredient, one of which is Kikkoman. The ingredient labels tend to be multilingual, but nothing else is, so I have no idea what the 6-7 different varieties every manufacturer offers are for. Not to mention the incredible variety of other corn syrup products I would not be tempted to use even if I knew what they were for. The fish department, though – wow, it’s great!
I have to say – In the World Cup of large Asian supermarket chains, it’s a tough contest between Patel Bros. and H Mart for me. Where one of my kids is about to move, her regular supermarket is going to be Patel Bros. We are all super-excited about that.
To make soy sauce sweeter? I believe there are two types of basic soy sauce, one is sweeter than the other. I only use organic Tamari soy sauce, which is gluten free with no sugar (https://san-j.com/products/organic-tamari-gluten-free-soy-sauce, Whole Foods carries it).
This sort of reminds me…for those of you who are on the Whole 30 or Paleo way of eating, quite a few essential Asian foods and ingredients are off the plate so to speak. Many of which are almost showstoppers. No rice, noodles, roti, tofu, bean sprouts or soy sauce. (You need to use Coconut Aminos instead of soy sauce, which has an interesting texture to it). No miso soup or edamame. No sriracha. Most fish sauces are out, except for some like Red Boat. No soybean, peanut, canola, or corn oil. You really can’t go out to eat at all since almost all Asian restaurants use MSG. No boba drinks.
I have stopped going to asian restaurants when I began to watch my diet. No more Pad Thai, Chinese takeouts, or Korean bbq or kimchi for me. You wouldn’t expect it since they don’t taste sweet mostly but all of them use too much sugar in food preparation. Another trouble I have with buying from asian groceries is their nutrient label doesn’t seem accurate. One of the salt packages I looked at H-mart had 0 for sodium.