Asian food includes many different food cultures with a great variety of variety. Broadly speaking, one can distinguish Indian, Southeast Asian, Chinese, and Japanese food. What gives the Asian food a special character is certain products such as coconut fat/milk, bamboo shoots and rice or noodles, special sauces such as soy and Asian fish sauce, as well as some spices for example:
- Coriander has a very special sweet, slightly bitter taste and is used extensively, both fresh leaves and seeds.
- Ginger and carrot have a strong, characteristic taste similar to each other, but the ginger is sweet.
- Lemongrass acts as an alternative to lemon, with its sour taste. Occurs, among other things in wok dishes, marinades.
- Chill fruit, the world’s most flavored, so also in Asia.
Spice mixtures occur in large numbers, e.g. ketjab and Chinese five spices. Other notable spices include cinnamon, sesame seeds, lime leaves, mint, Sichuan pepper, and star anise.
Spice or herb?
What is a spice and how to divide it has always been a problem.
A spice is in the dictionary “aromatic dried herbs or plants”. In other words, does not include fresh herbs, because they are fresh produce. However, the current belief today is that fresh spices are spices.
Whether a seed or vegetable is a spice or not is a personal idea as to whether it has much flavor.
Then it is difficult to determine what herbs are. Most stick to only fresh herbs. Also, what is a pepper spice. Is it just that they have a strong taste? Or is it the name pepper that determines?