Food ‘n Drink

You need to shop in a Chinese Supermarket. The foods on offer in our usual British supermarkets are okay but they’re not always great. I used to do a chicken stirfry using Amoy’s straight to wok Black Pepper sauce, however since the range’s facelift they seem to have dumped this flavour and the ones left are all too sweet, including the Black Bean (which shouldn’t be sweet at all!). Compare a Chicken in Black Bean sauce from a Chinese takeaway to a packet of the apparent same sauce - completely different! The Black Pepper sauce was such a closer match and for a few years was great to have. Also noodles, my other gripe. The noodles you buy from our shops are rubbish. Amoy straight to Wok noodles come out stodgy and tasteless, super noodles - well let’s not go there. Again, trying to recreate a good chow mein or vermicelli from the Chinese takeaway just doesn’t seem possible.

So if you want to recreate your favourite chinese meals the easiest method must be to shop in the same shops that the takeaway most likely goes to! We were up in Liverpool yesterday and so went to China Town where there were a couple of supermarkets. After a brief wander round I came across a few different jars of Black Pepper sauce, Dave picked up a singapore noodle sauce and we grabbed a bag of dried noodles with no markings on the bag. I’ve had dried noodles before from a Chinese takeaway I used to live above, and these produced the best noodles I’d ever cooked myself. This bag looked like it contained similar noodles and without the markings or instructions on the bag I figured they must be the ones the takeaways buy as they don’t need instructions!

In another shop I found a blue dragon packet sauce of Black Pepper sauce too. I’m sure I’ve never seen that in the Blue Dragon section of Sainsburys! So we’ve got a few ingredients to play with and if anything comes out well we’ll keep a note of it. I’m hoping to go back with the car one time as there were lots of frozen foods such as ready made spring rolls, won tons etc. which would be great to keep in the freezer. We often buy Chinese (no decent Pizza delivery round here!) when we can’t be bothered to cook and hopefully having the starters in the freezer will save some money!