You don’t need to board a long-haul flight out of London to find the world’s most exciting flavours. Specialist ingredients and deep culinary knowledge now sit right at your fingertips, so recreating international dishes in your own kitchen has never been easier.
A traditional dish is one of the most tangible ways to explore another culture. The many international grocery shops in London stocks ingredients for virtually every cuisine, which means you can bring those flavours home, then smell, touch and taste history at your own dining table.
When you do travel, head for the local markets and street food stalls. If you can, find a local guide or join a local food tour. They show you how people really eat, which produce is in season and how the local cuisine came to be, or how it was adapted to the local produce.
Start with the story behind the dish
Knowing where a dish comes from makes it far more meaningful and rewarding to cook. A little research into a regional speciality quickly explains unfamiliar techniques and unusual flavour pairings and for adventurous cooks it is a reliable way to widen your repertoire.
Rather than treating one recipe as the definitive version, find cooks with first-hand knowledge of their own cuisine and compare a few takes. You will understand how local agriculture, migration, climate and religious practice shape what ends up on the plate and that makes every cuisine richer to enjoy.
Let distinctive ingredients do the talking
Fragrant spices, pungent condiments and rich sauces can add real depth to a meal without filling your larder with ingredients you will barely touch.
Choose items that earn their shelf space across several dishes, rather than a highly specialised product you might use once. A tub of gochujang, a jar of rose harissa or a bottle of pure roasted sesame oil can transform and enhance dozens of midweek dinners. Look for these essentials in Asian supermarkets, international grocers, community food markets or specialist online retailers that deliver nationwide.
Here are some shops where you can get some of the more unusual ingredients:
- Loong Fong, Wardour Street, London Chinatown for all the Chinese ingredients you might need like wonton wrappers, XO sauce, proper soy sauce adn oyster sauce and lots of dry ingredients like jujube dates, wood ear mushrooms and Chinese herbal soup packs.
- New Long Moon, Wardour Street, London Chinatown for Chinese ingredients but they sell a great selection of Southeast Asian things like Thai curry pastes, massive bags of dried chilli, Malaysian curry sauces, belacan, palm sugar, sago pearls and more. They also have a section with Taiwanese condiments which are not easy to find. Both these places have a section of Korean and Japanese ingredients too.
- Here is a guide to stocking a Chinese Food Larder.
- Wai Yee Hong in Bristol is the go-to shop for all things Chinese and East Asian.
- In outer London, head to cash and carry like Wing Yip in Croydon or Alperton
- Seoul Plaza, HMart and Oseyo are springing up all over London, selling not just the staple Korean ingredients like gochujang, samjang, doenjang and kimchi, they also sell a large variety of instant ramyon and tteokboki. If you want to trek to Little Korea in New Malden, they have the enormous Hmart with freshly sliced meat for Korean BBQ, ready made bibimbap vegetables and more. While you are there, grab a meal at one of the fab Korean restaurants.
- For Caribbean recipes that call for callaloo or plantain, your best bet is to head to Brixton Market where the stalls have a massive array of ingredients, including yams and red palm oil.
- For Indian spices and ingredients, Southall or the East End around Aldgate East has many stalls and markets that sell fresh ingredients and spices. It is also the best place to buy seasonal Indian mangoes.
- For Turkish ingredients and cookware, Green Lanes is the best place. The street is lined with little shops selling all sorts of dates and nuts. In the shop windows, ladies are hand rolling delicious Gozleme, stuffed Turkish flatbread.
Explore food destinations from your screen
Digital travel resources, authentic restaurant menus and regional food publications often reveal dishes that never reach a standard Western cookbook. Even Waitrose’s weekly freebie paper has a lot of recipes that use some of the more interesting ingredients that we don’t normally have in a regular larder.
Some regional food blogs and videos restrict their content by location. If you are wondering how to change IP address, a quick search will show you how to browse as a local would, opening up a whole tier of authentic recipes. Keep your focus on the culinary research: investigate local terminology, note regional variations and learn the cultural background of any dish that catches your eye.
Make the recipe work in your own kitchen
Few home cooks have a clay oven or other special cookware, some tweaking is inevitable. A sensible adaptation respects the dish’s origin, flavour and core profile, while a drastic or ridiculous substitution changes what you are actually recreating.
Here are some international recipes you can try:
You might swap an obscure regional citrus like yuzu for lime juice, or use a heavy cast-iron skillet in place of a wok. Be upfront about these changes rather than passing the result off as entirely traditional. Once you understand the original dish and what each key component is for, you can experiment freely to suit your own taste.
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