Food shopping in Leipzig

Taking courage after Clotilde's nice comment to my bakeries post, I decided to write a bit more often about nice food shops around here. Last Friday's day trip to Leipzig was quite successful in this respect. I visited two shops a friend, Goetz, strongly recommended and came back, happy, with a slightly lighter wallet and carrying three rather full shopping bags containing some Asian and some Italian goodies. So to say something to travel far away and something to feel at home.

My first stop was Mekong, a Chinese/Vietnamese shop quite close to the railway station (Am Bruehl, 14-16). The shop is quite small, more of a long tight corridor, with a small downstairs space, than anything else. That doesn't mean there's little on offer. Every free surface, nook, corner, is filled with goods from rice to plates, canned and fresh vegetables and herbs, spices and even some cookware. I love such places, I could spend hours just looking through the shelves, and it probably WOULD take hours to look through all the products on sale. My only minor disappointment was that there was only a very tiny choice of Japanese food on sale. I had hoped to be able to finally be able to prepare some dashi broth with real bonito flakes but nope, I'll have to wait.

At the end this is what I left with:
- a few fresh herbs: Thai basil, cilantro and mint. Finally some cilantro sold with its root still attached (important in Thai cooking). I'm not sure about the mint: tasted a lot milder than the one I'm used to.

- some Thai apple aubergines. These are really nice, pale green, firm and with a quite delicate taste.

- Galangal and grachai. Both rhizomes. Grachai is called sometimes wild ginger but I found it has very little to do with the taste of ginger. It is more earthy than anything else. Galangal has a more balsamic aroma. I had never had the chance to smell some fresh sliced galangal before but I found this great, so different from anything else and so multi-layered. Just once and I've become a galangal fan!

- Two rice sorts: Vietnamese jasmine and sticky black rice. I bought the Vietnamese rice mainly to try a new brand out and the black rice to make a nice Thai sweet I recently read about, and some palm sugar to go with that.

- a few canned goods: crab meat, for some reason impossible to find in Jena, water chestnuts and whole bamboo sprouts. I know all these would be better fresh, but do you think I have a choice?

- some white rice cakes. These are sort of thick oval noodles, which need to be softened in water for some time (I've read 12 hours somewhere). I used to have one or two nice recipes for these, from a friend who studied Chinese and often cooked them, but can't seem to find them anymore. Has anyone got a tip? Renee?

If you have the feeling that I was planning some Thai cooking, well just wait for the next posts. You might be right :-).

After I left I seriously considered not going to the Italian store. Had plenty of cooking ingredients already. But I guess I was curious to see what a "very nice Italian delicatessen" is, from a German point of view. After walking much longer than I would have imagined fro my city map I finally got to Mangiare (Karl-Liebknecht-Str. 73). This shop was almost a shock after Mekong. Small too, but with so much free space! Apart from this, the shop is OK. It has lots of nice preserves, a good pasta choice (from De Cecco), a few nice EVOO and vinegars. There's some cold meats and cheeses on sale too. The cheeses were quite interesting, the meats IMO less, at least for me, just the standard kinds found anywhere in Italy. I had hoped for a little more interesting wine choice too. All together a nice shop, good for the local standard and maybe just a tad disappointing for the spoilt guy that I am. Not too bad though, otherwise I wouldn't have left with a bag full of stuff (some pastas, some aubergine preserves, some cheeses).

Now I only have to find time to cook all this stuff....

Comments

[Renee]

hey alberto... I'm trying to accurately guess which sort of white rice cakes you are referring to... I think I know, but can't be sure...
hmmm... let me think about this... will be back : )

[Alberto]

Renee, this site has a pic of the exact same thing I bought

http://www.delightquest.com/cgi-local/shop.pl/page=cat_M_01.htm

[Renee]

thanks for the pic link.
yep, I was thinking you were probably referring to these.
strangely enough, my experience of these have been somewhat limited - have only eaten them in Shanghainese dishes, tho' I'm sure they appear in other dialect dishes too (sichuan or hunan maybe??)

the shanghainese usually stir fry them with pork, vegetables and/or preserved vegetables. I've also seen vegetarian versions - i.e. stir fried with fresh veggies and wheat gluten.
but I think they would work well with things like chicken, dried chillies, bean paste sauce etc too.

they require quite a bit of preparation beforehand tho - soaking and boiling.

sorry, I don't have any recipes tho'...

erm... ok, I don't think I was much help at all, was I? ack!

[Alberto]

Renee, no help? hey you gave me loads of info! No recipe, OK, but enough to try and create something. I guess I'll try a few ideas your comment gave me and then post about it :-)

[lazykitchenhand]

Come to Melbourne some day. I went shopping for asian ingredients in Chinatown (Little Bourke St)and got everything, the herbs, the vegetables, the rice (dozens of varieties), the noodles, the soups, the spices, the vinegars and so much more - everything from regional Chinese through to Malaysian, Korean and Japanese. Vietnamese of course as well. Fish, lamb, chicken, duck, fish, eels, pork.

Then a ten minute walk found me in Little Italy (Lygon St) for espresso and cake, maybe some lunch, the best pasta e fagioli in town, trippa alla romana, risotto milanese, pasta of many delicious kinds, maybe a ricotta calzone so light it floats off the plate ...

Come to Melbourne everyone.

[Alberto]

I'd love to come to Melbourne and who knows, maybe one day I will. But flying around the globe for some shopping seems a bit expensive ;-). From what you describe both Chinatown and little Italy sound great... maybe I should really consider Australia as the next place to move to :-)...

[Mohan Narasimhan]

Hi,

I live in Toronto now, for the past 2 years. Prior to this i lived in USA, in Boston and Virginia, for ten years, did my MBA from Boston a few years ago.

I have some friends from Leipzig, Germany. I have never been there but they say some nice things about the city; apparently people from Russia and Asia are emigrating to this city, due to what it has to offer??

Is this true?? Tell me more about the city, and also about its Chinatown!

Mohan mohan_nara@yahoo.com

[Alberto]

Mohan,

Leipzig is a growing town and probably one of the few in the former German East that's developing its economy in a succesfull way. Ther is an historical (from GDR times) russian and vietnamese community though I'm not really aware about their size. But there's no chinatown, sadly.

[Theresa]

The oval rice cakes are a staple of Hockchew cooking (from Fuzhou in China). It is a little-known cuisine in Singapore, not very commercially available; it's one of the minority dialects in the country.
I have been trying to get my mum to ask her sis for the recipe (both are Hockchews) but I remember the rice cakes were soaked overnight - as you said. And then the next day they were stir-fried with some sliced shiitake mushroom, quite a bit of leeks as I remember, and spring onions. I don't remember any meat inside but I'm fairly sure it must have been loshed around in a tasty stock, and perhaps a dash of Chinese rice wine. The final result was relatively soft (the trick is not to get it too soggy) rice cakes, flavoured with the stock and with a strong but not overpowering taste of leeks. It was one of my favourite dishes but one I only ate once a year - while other people chatted away at Chinese New Year get-togethers, I would be sitting quietly eating plates of this in the corner!

Alberto, it does sound like a simple stir fry might do the trick! :)

[Alberto]

Theresa, thanks! I saved about half the package in case I found a better recipe than the first one I used (more or less straight from my immagination and a failure). I'll definitely try it out soon.