Oyster sauce

A good, basic seasoning sauce for stir frying and braising, it can also be used directly on blanched vegetables or tofu. Oyster sauce is more expensive than oyster-flavored sauce.  

Soy sauce, dark

There are two kinds. Dark soy sauce that is liquid like regular soy sauce but aged, and darker in color. (Third from left in photo.) And thick, dark soy sauce that…

Soy Sauce, Light

In this blog I refer to this as soy sauce. This is regular soy sauce (jiang yu)  and is light soy sauce to differentiate it from dark soy sauce, which…

Soy sauce, general

You’d think buying soy sauce is simple but this condiment can take up a whole aisle in an Asian supermarket. The choices are so wide I’ve seen many people stand…

Hoisin sauce

Hoisin Jeong in Cantonese, or haixian jiang in Mandarin, means seafood sauce. Hoi or hai means sea and sin or xian is fresh. The two Chinese characters combined, hoisin or…

Coconut milk

Traditionally we get our coconut milk by squeezing freshly grated coconut with sheer brute strength. We’d put the grated coconut in fine cloth, wrap around it and wring it dry.…