How to Prepare Lemongrass for Cooking: Trim, Bruise, Mince, Store Lemongrass looks intimidating the first time you hold it — a bundle of tough, fibrous stalks that seem more like yard waste than food. The whole trick is knowing that most of the stalk is packaging. The usable part is the tender core at the … Read more
Fish Sauce for Cooking: Labels, Flavor and Substitutions Fish sauce is the backbone of Vietnamese cooking — the salty, savory depth behind pho broth, noodle bowls, and the dipping sauce that shows up next to nearly everything. But the bottle wall at the Asian grocery is genuinely confusing: prices from a few dollars to twenty, … Read more
Walk into an Asian grocery and the herb wall can feel like a test you didn’t study for. Bunches of green leaves, half of them labeled only in Vietnamese, and no obvious way to tell which one goes in the spring rolls and which one would ruin them. This guide is meant to fix that. … Read more