Korean Cooking

Bring Korean flavours to your home cooking with this lively, aromatic blend that packs a punch. Chilli and garlic fans will love this blend. Gochugaru chilli delivers a warm and lingering heat with sweet and smoky undertones, enhanced by the bold flavour of garlic and the nuttiness of sesame and mustard seeds. Use in homecooked Korean BBQ and stews or add to homemade kimchi. As versatile as it is delicious, this blend is also a fantastic finishing spice for sprinkling over pizza, amplifying sauces, elevating soups or any dishes that need a quick chilli-garlic boost.

Flavour Notes: Smoky, warm, garlicky, nutty

Cuisine: Korean

Heat Level: 1/5

Rumoured to have originated from the cold lands of Siberia, garlic (like its relative, the onion) has been gracing dishes since ancient times, and remains one of the most universal ingredients in kitchens around the world. In powder form, its flavour is punchier and more concentrated than fresh garlic, and it blends evenly into rubs, marinades and dressings.

This tuberous rhizome has been travelling across oceans since Chinese navigators began growing it in planter boxes onboard their vessels. Versatile and well represented in many cuisines, ginger in its powdered form can be added to stir-fry dishes, noodles and rice, sauces and marinades.

Use these nutty, crunchy and striking coloured seeds to lift Asian dishes and modern desserts. Coat meat or fish in sesame seeds before cooking for flavour, colour and crunch. Popping up in desserts like tuiles and macarons, ice creams and eclairs, cakes, panna cottas and doughnuts, black sesame is the new poppy seed!

The famous phrase 'open sesame' derives from the popping sound akin to a lock spring opening that a ripened sesame pod makes as it bursts open. These hulled seeds are immensely popular in cooking all over the world and form the base for kitchen staples like tahini, hommus and sesame oil. In Mexican cooking, it is used in sauces for mole or adobo. Sesame is also widely used to decorate artisanal breads.