Doing the La Bomba

Coach House Books launches its new compendium of GTA food facts and stories, The Edible City: Toronto’s Food from Farm to Fork, with a special culinary-themed event tomorrow afternoon at the Gladstone Hotel (2 p.m. Free). To keep in the spirit of things, Books@Torontoist presents a third and final excerpt from the book.  Today critic, writer and poet Kevin Connolly stalks the city’s non-corporate food aisles in search of the perfect ingredients in ”From galangal to la bomba: Where to find exotic ingredients in Toronto.”

From Galangal to La Bomba: Where to find exotic ingredients in Toronto

by Kevin Connolly

It’s long been common knowledge that Toronto’s enviable experiment in diversity has also made it one of the best cities in the world to eat. You can have Brazilian barbecue one night, Korean barbecue the next, grab dim sum or sushi for lunch, then meet friends for an Indian or Italian or Greek or Ethiopian dinner. And all at a fraction of what it costs you in most of the Western world. But if you’re like me, an increasingly obsessive home cook, that diversity of food also represents a diversity of opportunity. If a kebab house on the Danforth dusts its skewers with sumac and zatar, it can only mean one thing: somewhere, and likely somewhere nearby, there’s a store that stocks those two rather exotic spices.

It’s taken me years, a lot of trial and error, and some rather ludicrous pantomime with someone who speaks little or no English to understand what, exactly, is packaged in cellophane and marked only with Chinese or Korean or Cyrillic characters. But I can now say that as good a place as Toronto is to find a meal from almost any world cuisine, it’s just as good for finding ingredients, if you know where to look.

When your cooking needs cross language barriers, ingredient hunting is time-consuming. Thai food, for instance, involves specialized ingredients: Thai basil (which has a mildly licorice flavour); those little red chilies called bird’s tongue, plentiful in Chinatown but never seen in a Loblaws; Chinese purple shallots (ditto); kaffir lime leaves; and a smaller, smooth-skinned, ginger-like root called galangal. When I first started cooking Thai food I couldn’t find half these things. There was dried galangal but it added no more than a trace of the heady citronella smell that reigns over a bowl of green coconut curry; I finally discovered it mislabeled as “white ginger” in two shops in the Gerrard Street Chinatown. The lime leaves were easier to find and, thankfully, freeze well. For almost a year I’d go to one shop for one ingredient, another for something else. It turned the making of a simple dinner into a two-day affair.

These days when I want to make Thai food, I go to Fu Yao supermarket on Gerrard, a few doors west of Degrassi. It’s a bustling, slightly dingy place that’s showing its age (the floor will never be clean), and the staff tend to get a little pissy late in the day (14-hour shifts will do that to you), but the vegetables are well maintained and they stock almost every Asian sauce imaginable – nearly a dozen different styles of soy sauce, for example. They also have fresh galangal, kaffir lime leaves, Chinese shallots, Thai chilies and basil, coconut milk, rice and rice stick from Thailand, long beans, Golden Mountain Sauce (a hard-to-find Thai condiment that’s like a cross between soy sauce and Worcestershire). Better still, they have them all, all the time, even in the dead of winter.

I’ve grown picky about my beef and chicken, but Asians will not put up with dodgy pork and I’ve found here the shoulder, neck and belly cuts that tend to be unavailable in regular supermarkets and cannot be replaced in certain dishes. It can be a little bit of a culture shock at first watching men in bloody overcoats go all Hannibal Lecter with the band saw on indeterminate slabs of meat, but what do you think goes on in the back room at Sobeys? I say suck up or become a vegetarian.

The Chinese are very serious about their ginger, as it appears in almost every Chinese recipe. Ripe ginger is juicy and bright gold under the skin and exactly the colour of a pineapple, not the greying fibrous nightmare you tend to find. And it’s not even a question of age. Ginger will dry a little as it’s stored, but it’s always perfectly useable days and even weeks later. One thing I do stay away from at Asian markets

is the garlic. White-skinned, slightly bitter and usually sold very cheap in three-pack nets, it’s harvested early so it won’t spoil on the trip from China.

So where do you find good garlic? Where people won’t put up with bad. One such place is Masellis Supermarket on Danforth just east of Jones, which stocks local, purple-skinned garlic when in season and good bulbs from California the rest of the year. As the downtown Little Italy has slowly gentrified, most of its Italian grocers have closed or moved elsewhere.

But Masellis Brothers, as it used to be called, has been here since the 1960s in this east-end Italian/Macedonian/ Greek enclave and stocks the best selection of imported Italian products I know of, from good olive oil from dozens of makers and balsamic vinegar from Modena to gourmet dried pasta and canned tuna packed in olive oil.

Even good imported Italian tomatoes aren’t created equal. I’ve found one brand (De Cecco) where the ingredients list reads, simply, ‘tomatoes.’ They’re not cheap (they can be four to five dollars for a 32-ounce can) but they’re just that little bit better, and when they’re the key ingredient for an already cheap meal like a pot of pasta sauce, I say spend the extra 50 cents a portion. Since you’re in the neighbourhood, it’s worth stopping in at Uzel Olives and Olive Oil, a relatively new specialty store a few doors west of the Donlands subway. Uzel may not, as its Turkish owner proudly states, sell ‘the best olives in the world,’ but they do sell the best olives I’ve ever tasted. The place keeps odd hours (“I’m a wholesaler,” explains the always affable, always weary-looking owner, “this is more of a showroom.”) and I’ve often dropped in at quiet hours of the evening and picked up some of the dozen or so varieties of certified organic olives, available in 200 gram packages ($3.99, or $7.50 for two) or sold by weight from behind the counter. I’m not exactly sure what makes them so good – maybe the small family-owned organic producer outside Istanbul, maybe that they’re produced without chemicals. The last time I was in, a woman who was born in Kalamata (kind of a hotspot for olives) was arguing with the owner about his sign. She was mostly kidding, but he was having none of it, pointing out that unlike commercial black olives, the slightly wrinkled ebony beauties from his family farm are left to blacken “on the tree.”

I mentioned sumac and zatar earlier, Middle Eastern spices that are so specialized most merchants give you a blank stare when you ask about them. Ground sumac is tart, earthy, citrusy and slightly bitter, a mahogany-coloured spice you sometimes see sprinkled over a kebab or a bowl of hummus at an authentic Middle Eastern restaurant. I used to be able to get it at Asia Supermarket, on Danforth near Victoria Park, but that’s a carpet mall now. I’ve seen it occasionally at Mumtaz Groceries, the best of a string of four Afghani/Muslim stores in a strip mall on the south side of Danforth just east of the mosque at Donlands. The same shop carries dried zatar, a kind of wild thyme, and bottled pomegranate molasses, and orange and rose flower water from Iran and Lebanon (used in anything from fruit salads to baking) at a fraction of what they sell in fancy-looking gift bottles at Pusateri’s. They also stock Hewitt’s Natural Yogurt, a great product from a smaller local producer, again at a price appropriate to the modest, family-oriented neighbourhood of mostly Muslim immigrants.

Speaking of Little India, the resurgence of Leslieville to the south has pulled what looked like a badly slumping strip back from the brink and promises to restore it to its former glory. It doesn’t hurt that Indian cuisine is back in, especially for the legion of well-heeled vegetarians buying and renovating the older but larger homes in what was once a working-class neighbourhood. As far as ingredients for East Indian cooking go, I like B.J. Supermarket, which carries most of the standard Indian ingredients: spices and spice mixes, rice of various grades and origins, atta (whole-meal wheat), flour for rotis and chapati, methi leaf (the green plant that also produces fenugreek seeds), green chilies (different from those used in Mexican or West Indian food), and red and yellow onions in 10-pound bags – no cuisine uses more onions than Indian, and any cook appreciates it when you can get good onions in bulk for 40 or 50 cents a pound.

I buy my Indian spices a few blocks west, at Toronto Cash and Carry, because of the consistent freshness (as important in a dried product as in a fresh one) and because the owner buys in bulk and packages them in various sizes. Everything is here, from black cumin and whole brown cardamom to packages of hulled black seeds, from the green cardamom pods (a big timesaver when you’re making garam masala), padna, jasmine and good basmati rice sold in one- to five-pound packages, and some fresh produce in boxes out front.