Category Archives: Uncategorized

Seaweed is a nutritious ingredient that’s rich in glutamate, the amino acid responsible for umami, and has been gaining popularity in the mainstream culinary world. This sea vegetable is commonly found in East Asian cuisines, but parts of Great Britain also have a rich history of incorporating it into their diets. Aside from being highly nutritious […]

Seasoning food perfectly is one of the greatest skills both a chef and home cook can possess. A lack of salt equals a lack of flavour, while too much salt can easily ruin an otherwise perfectly-cooked plate of food. While recipes often simply call for ‘salt’, the type of salt you choose to deploy will affect not […]

Along with flour and salt, sugar is one of those fundamental pantry staples that’s never too far from reach. Our first memories of cooking include measuring out a cup or two of sugar for a batch of biscuits or a celebratory cake, and checking to see if we have enough sugar is a customary part of writing […]

Yotam Ottolenghi is renowned for his ability to pack the maximum amount of flavour into every dish he creates. Appropriate, then, that his latest book is named just that. ‘Flavour’, takes the philosophies espoused in his hugely successful previous offerings, ‘Simple’ and ‘Plenty’, and evolves them for today’s home kitchen. Vegetables are treated as the […]

Written by Grace Mooney At the Essential Ingredient we have been steadily growing our range of oriental ingredients, with new favourites including Tasmanian grown shima wasabi, a range of premium soy and fish sauces, and nori komi furikake rice seasoning – to name but a few. It is said that the food of Japan speaks […]

Dried chillies, whether whole or in flaked form, add not only a hit of heat to any recipe, but an incredibly diverse range of flavours as well. Take, for example, the intense smokiness of dried chipotle chillies, the ripe fruitiness of dried ancho chillies, and the fiery umami of the dried habanero chilli. Dried chillies are far more […]

For several years the world supply of vanilla products has been affected by the failure of crops in a number of significant countries, among them Indonesia. This has given rise to a flood of synthetic vanilla products, found widely throughout supermarkets, which consumers have become accustomed to. Sadly, many people have now forgotten the magical […]