So many vinegars, so little time to wrap your head around them all. Take rice vinegar, for instance – it’s not even a single vinegar; it’s an entire category. There are clear rice vinegars, seasoned ones, black ones, brown ones, and even red ones. What are the differences, and how do you know which one to use…

Pekmez is a thick, dark syrup made from fruit, most commonly grapes, although carob, mulberries, pomegranates or even figs are also used. Deeply rooted in Turkish and Middle Eastern cuisine, pekmez is used as a sweetener...

Starch noodles are made from the starches of plants such as mung beans, cassava (tapioca), rice and, yes, even sweet potatoes. Their extracted starch is mixed with water to form a dough, then shaped into a variety of noodles. Some are as fine as vermicelli..

Semolina. If you’re thinking it’s old-fash and reminiscent of bland puddings and porridges your grandparents might have eaten, then its time for a major reset. Yes, it’s a fairly humble ingredient but when used in certain scenarios, semolina can be downright yum…

Yep, reluctant. That’s most of you – we know for a fact. (If we’re wrong, please hit us up with a barrage of comments on Insta and we will grovel. Promise. We’d love to be wrong here). Baking with yeast can seem daunting from the outside looking in. After all…

If you’ve been keeping up, we took a bit of a general dive into soy sauce, plus types of Chinese soy sauce in a recent post. Now it’s time to look at other national styles of soy, remembering that it’s always best to use soy sauces from the same cuisine as the dish you’re cooking and eating…

With its warm, earthy, musky flavour, cumin is a distinctive and essential feature of many cuisines, including Latin American, Middle Eastern, North African, Indian and even regional Chinese. Used in both seed form as well as ground, it traces all the way back to ancient Egypt when it was an ingredient in the mummification process….

Also known as bulgur or cracked wheat, burghul is a nutritious staple in many cuisines, particularly Turkish. Because rice was expensive in the Ottoman era, bulgur, which was cheaper, became a staple. A grain product made from different types of wheat, primarily durum wheat…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. That would suck)…

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…

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…

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…