Things to Buy at an Asian Grocery Store | HiYou

You want to cook delicious and authentic Asian cuisine at home in your own kitchen? Well, why wouldn’t you? Asian cuisines from Hong Kong to Saigon to Kuala Lumpur and beyond offer healthy, flavourful meals that can be incredibly quick to produce, making them ideal for our modern busy lifestyles. But where do you start?

The first, and perhaps the most important thing you have to do is make sure that you use the finest quality authentic Asian groceries you can get hold of. This may seem rather obvious but settling for “best fit” ingredients is one of the most serious common mistakes that many new Asian cooks in the UK make, and there is no need to do so. And if a quick Google for “Asian Food Store Near Me” tells you that the nearest brick and mortar store is a couple of miles away look for Asian supermarket online UK - and if you are reading this then you have already found the best!

Of course finding a good Asian Supermarket online UK is merely the first step. We give our UK customers access to the best possible fresh ingredients and authentic Asian culinary products. Great. But what do you do with them? And what do you need to make each dish?

There are two ways to gain this knowledge. Ideally you need to have been raised from childhood in an Asian home being taught to cook by the older generation.  We appreciate that it may be a little difficult for most of our customers to achieve so you might have to settle for finding some good recipes. There are of course any amount of great cookery books on the subject, but with the advent of social media such as YouTube and TikTok you can watch “how to” videos by real cooks from all over Asia meaning that even as a westerner you can still really learn Asian home cooking from real Asian home cooks.

When you do so you will learn to ignore the celebrity chefs who insist that you make every sauce and paste from scratch. Sometimes you might choose to do so, and if you do our Asian supermarket online UK will supply all the fresh and authentic ingredients you could ever need. But do you really routinely make your own Ketchup, mustard or mayonnaise from scratch? Of course not, so it really is no surprise that Asian cooks usually buy their curry paste from a shop. The trick for real authenticity is to have access to the same brands that they buy. At our Asian supermarket, you can.

Getting the right rice for the right dish is also important.  Not so very long ago UK shoppers were limited to a choice between short or long grain, with the possibility of Basmati if you were shopping somewhere posh. But not all rice is created equal. Just as Europe boasts a multitude of breads, from the Irish sourdough to German Ryebread to Greek Pitta and beyond Asian cuisines have their own specific kinds of rice. Fortunately when they shop at our Asian supermarket online UK cooks can source the exact rice they need for their dish, from the glutenous rice required for many Thai dishes to the perfect Sushi rice to every other kind of rice you can imagine.

You should also be equally diligent with noodles. Egg noodles are not the same as rice noodles. Ramen noodles are not the same as Udon noodles, and so on. Using the wrong noodles can turn what would have been an authentic and delicious dish into a mis-matched mess.  So just as with rice when they come to our Asian supermarket online UK cooks should check their recipe carefully and select the appropriate noodle for the dish they want to make. We have them all, so just click and go!

And that is it. Find your recipes and come to our Asian supermarket online to get all the ingredients you need. There is a whole world of flavour waiting for you, so search for “Asian food store near me”, find us and discover the taste of Asia!