Soy sauce. It’s essential to so many of the cuisines we all know and love… yet how much do we really know about it? With myriad soy sauces Out There, we thought it was as good a time as any to take a deep dive into its brackish, salty, umami-laden depths…

‘Vanilla’. It’s code for boring. Everyday. A bit colourless. Plain. Basic. Lacking bells and whistles. Which is kind of weird – not to mention unfair – as actual vanilla is expensive to buy and has incredibly complex, alluring flavours…

Ooooh, peanut butter. What would sandwiches and toast be without it? Apparently, even the Aztecs ate a version of mashed-up roasted peanuts but the product we know today wasn't created until the late nineteenth century. A handful of folk lay claim to its development, not least of all Dr J. H. Kellogg of the famed cereal…

Why hello, pantry! You’re looking a little crowded. Yep, we really have to rummage to find certain things in our pantry lately. (Well, in one of our pantries. As in ‘the pantry of one of us”. Because who has multiple pantries?). We can never find the chilli flakes when we crave some on our pasta; they’re buried in the general spice mess…

Google “turmeric” and you’d be excused for thinking you’d discovered the meaning of life, the universe and everything. “The most powerful herb on the planet at fighting and potentially reversing disease” exclaims one website. (Um, it’s a spice not a herb?) “May have health benefits for nearly every system in the body” declares another. From stopping flatulence to Alzheimer’s prevention, from keeping aging, cancer and heart disease at bay via the power of antioxidants, it would seem there’s not much turmeric can’t do…

Overnight soaking... draining... cooking... sometimes it’s just all too much to prep dried legumes like chickpeas from scratch. For those times, it’s canned chickpeas for the win. Unless you own a pressure cooker, in which case, you’re smart. We don’t so we’re not…

Palm sugar is made from the sap of various palm trees, including the date, palmyra, sago and coconut, but it’s generally not labelled by specific variety. It’s pretty much all sold as ‘palm sugar.’ You might come across ‘gula melaka,’ which is the Malay name for palm sugar and often refers specifically to the rich, dense, dark palm sugar from Malaysia, specifically Melaka…

Anchovies. For such tiny little suckers, they’re bigly polarising. But love ’em or loathe ’em, these salty, umami-fied flavour bombs bring flavour to all sorts of scenarios – in pizzas, pastas, sauces, dressings, braises, tarts, dips, butters… the list goes on. Anchovies are an important ingredient in Italian, Southern French and Spanish cooking, which is understandable as they’re a major Mediterranean catch. Interestingly, there are 144 anchovy species worldwide and these range in size from 2cm to 40cm. While they can be eaten fresh, and are often used by fishermen for bait, it’s in their preserved state that most of us know them best…

It’s thought that miso was first made in China, then introduced to Japan sometime during the 7th century. It was considered a luxury product and not available to plebs. Like us. (Yeah, really. Imagine life with no miso soup to wash down your sushi.) At some time during the Muromachi Period (1392–1573), farmers starting growing more soybeans, learned to make their own miso, and regular dudes could finally use it in their cooking. Phew!

I takes quite the leap of faith to look at fresh milk and think “I could boil the hell out of that with a sh^& ton of sugar until it's thick and bloody bad for you, stick it in a tin, then make a motza from selling it”. And yet, here we are. Insanely sweet, gooey and lusciously drippy, nothing inspires an otherwise civilised person to eat straight from a can like sweetened condensed milk. It’s made by the slow evaporation of water from the whole milk to form the thick, concentrated milky liquid we all know and love so well. As noted, plenty of sugar (in a ratio of nearly half sugar to milk) gets added along the way. And don’t kid yourself. Yes, condensed milk contains all the goodness of actual milk (calcium, vitamin D, vitamin B12, vitamin A, riboflavin, phosphorus, and protein) but the added sugar and calories? Yeah, not very nutrish but what the hey. It’s great for the soul…

Saffron is perhaps most famous for being the world’s costliest spice, clocking in at around $500 for 100g. Yowzers. It’s processed from the whispery, dried stamens of a specific variety of crocus flower – the Crocus sativus. Each flower produces just three stamens and these are harvested painstakingly by hand, with pickers maybe retrieving about 1g of saffron in a full day. Which goes a long way to explain the price and so far, no-one’s come up with a machine for the job. The flowers need hot dry summers, cold winters and arid, treeless ground to thrive – the dry, eastern regions of Iran account for a large slice of global production but Spain grows around 70% of the world’s saffron. The harvesting window is short as the crocus only blooms in autumn for 2 or 3 weeks, and that’s it. S’all over…

This isn’t so much a pantry dive as a fridge rummage and yes, it’s time to chat cheese. Specifically parmesan. Dunno ‘bout you but it’s a staple at Chez LSC and no offence to our vaunted cheese producers, but nothing comes close to genuine Parmigiano Reggiano from northern Italy. While affording to use it every day might be a financial stretch, it’s worth splashing out every now and then to grate some over your best pasta dish, risotto, salad or crusty vegetable bake, for the right delicious finish. Genuine parmesan has complex flavours and when aged, it takes on an amazing granular texture from salt crystals that form throughout. Mmmm. Tasting a bit sharp, a touch fruity, a smidge nutty, a tad earthy, a little tangy and overall, deeply, deeply savoury, once you get your hands on real-deal Parmigiano Reggiano, there’s simply no going back. You’re ruined for the rest of your cheese-eating life and look. We’re sorry about that. (Not really)…

A unique ingredient from southern Turkey, pepper paste is a highly concentrated puree made from various types of cooked, peeled capsicums. It comes in a few permutations, tatli (or “sweet” ) and aci (“hot”), with a mild version in between. Called biber salçası in Turkish, pepper paste is incorporated into a wide variety of dishes, and used in much the same way (and sometimes in tandem with) tomato paste. From dips, spreads and salads through to stews, pilafs, soups, marinades and in fillings for dolma (stuffed vegetables), borek (pastries) and pide (Turkish pizza), pepper paste is a crucial Turkish ingredient, adding richness, intensity and lovely rich colour…

Mmm… maple syrup. Sounds sexier than ‘xylem sap’, doesn't it? Which, botanically speaking, is actually what it is. There’s more than a little romance around this most Canadian of products – yep, that’s a maple leaf adorning their striking national flag. Most of the world’s maple syrup (a whopping two thirds) comes from Quebec, with Ontario and the American states of Vermont, Maine and New York responsible for the rest. There are about 132 species of maple, but only three types are used for syrup; the black maple, red maple and sugar maple. ..