The Global Pantry Cookbook Transform Your Everyday

Cooking with Tahini, Gochujang, Miso, and Other Irresistible

Ingredients

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 Copyright © 2023 by Ann Taylor Pittman and Scott Mowbray

Food photography copyright © by Kevin Miyazaki

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced—mechanically,

electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying—without written

permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5235-1685-8

Design by Becky Terhune

Food photography by Kevin Miyazaki

Product photography by Spring Rd. Studios

Food styling by Erica McNeish

Props by Tina Gill

Hand-made Japanese ceramics by Kazu Oba, obaware.com

Additional props by Anuschka Pashel, bloomdenver.com

Additional copyediting by Susan Roberts McWilliams

Additional photos: Getty Images: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg p. 7 , Mehmet Akif

Parlak/Anadolu Agency p. viii. Shutterstock.com: AmyLv p. 14 , Angorius p. 14 ,

EvgeniiAnd p. 23 , manbo-photo p. 25 , New Africa p. 18 , Vitals p. 11 .

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 For Patrick, Connor, and Daniel

—Ann

For my enthusiastic eaters,

Kate, Rosa, Emily, Annie, and Emmy.

In memory of Kay Mowbray and Anne Eisen

—Scott
 Contents

INTRODUCTION
Discovering the Treasures of the Global Pantry
Global Pantry Products Used in This Book

CH A PTER 1
Wow-a-Crowd Snacks and Apps

CH A PTER 2
Crunchy, Vibrant Salads

CH A PTER 3
Soups and Comfort Stews

CH A PTER 4
Rich and Hearty Beef and Lamb

CH A PTER 5
Pork Is an Umami Superstar

CH A PTER 6
Poultry, Mostly Chicken, Entirely Elevated
 CH A PTER 7
Irresistible Fish and Seafood (Sustainable, Too)

CH A PTER 8
Meat-Free Mains for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

CH A PTER 9
Totally Satisfying Sandwiches

CH A PTER 10
Noodles, Pasta, Pizzas, and Breads

CH A PTER 11
Easy Vegetables and Starchy Things

CH A PTER 12
Seductive Sweets and Frozen Treats

A PPEN D IX: HOW TO BE A CA NNY GL OBA L PA NTRY

SHOPPER
Authenticity, Sources, Ethics
Sustainability, Carbon Footprints, and the Treatment of Animals

TOOL S, TERMS, A ND TECHNIQUES

A Few of Our Favorite Cooking Tools
Measurements and Weights

CON VERSION TA BL ES

INDEX

A CKNOWL EDGMENTS

A BOU T THE A U TH ORS

 INTRODUCTION
Discovering the Treasures of
the Global Pantry
The ancient alchemists who fancied that they could turn lead

into gold never managed the trick. But wondrous

transformations had been happening nearby, and pretty much

everywhere since pretty much forever. Food, under the sway of

biological processes, was being cured, salted, sugared, dried,

spiced, smoked, and fermented by cooks and artisans. As it was

preserved, flavors concentrated and transmuted. From the

Mekong Delta to the cacao-bean forests of the Olmec people in

present-day Mexico, a global pantry of fantastic treasures

marked the long, slow rise of the great cuisines. These

treasures, the heritage of hundreds or thousands of years of

food knowledge, survived to become ingredients that, today,

can imbue anyone’s cooking with their flavor magic. They are,

as our friend chef Keith Schroeder put it, “the gift of time in a

bottle.”
ABOVE: Pomegranate molasses is made the traditional way—
slow reduction of bright juice to syrupy goodness—by
villagers in the province of Gaziantep in southern Turkey,
near the Mediterranean sea (tragically, Gaziantep was
devastated by the 2023 earthquake). The result is tart,
tannic, fruity, and delicious. It’s easily found in Middle
Eastern food stores and good supermarkets.
For decades, these pantry treasures poured into American

“ethnic” shops and markets, powered by immigration and the

trade that flowed in its wake. Most were sold to their

immigrant communities, although any curious cook in a

midsize city could find a good number of them. Then,

accelerating as the 20th century progressed, came a great

awakening to flavors that had been hiding in plain sight all

along. Millions of Americans tasted dishes in restaurants and

markets that were made delicious, in part, by the global pantry.

The American palate has expanded remarkably since then, and

today the foods and flavors of Thailand, Korea, China, India,

Mexico, Israel, Lebanon, and so many more cuisines that

Americans go nuts for in restaurants can be brought into the

home—easily, cheaply, deliciously.

But these foods and flavors are not brought home, many of

them, usually. Partly this is because they’re intimidating or

assumed to be useful only in the dishes they’re associated with,

rather than understood as powerful and versatile new tools for

the cook’s toolbox. And partly because, however mall-

ubiquitous Thai and other restaurants have become,

ingredients like makrut lime leaves are rarely seen or

explained in chain supermarkets. For every thoroughly

mainstreamed elixir, like sriracha or balsamic vinegar, a

hundred other pantry products, often much more tasty, are

still mostly used by cooks who know and love them because

their mothers or fathers did: fermented fish sauces from

Vietnam, fruity chile pastes from Peru, salted lemons from

Morocco, gochujang from Korea. Yet these flavor bombs

represent some of the easiest ways to elevate anyone’s cooking.

The secrets of the global pantry are there for anyone to borrow.

This is the idea behind The Global Pantry Cookbook—

embracing a broad and playful flavor inclusiveness through

global pantry exploration. Of course, the products we celebrate

in these pages have long been essential to “American cooking,”

when the phrase is used to mean all the cooking in American

kitchens, whether in homes or restaurants, and not some

narrower slice of the pie. But these global pantry products may

not yet be used in your kitchen. To shop widely, to trip joyfully

down all the aisles of the global pantry, sampling its treasures,

is an adventure and education for any cook.

The variety of products is astonishing. There are 300-plus

jars of chile pastes and related mixtures on just one side of one

aisle in the pan-Asian supermarket, H Mart, a few miles from

Scott’s Colorado home (there are almost 100 outlets of this

wonderful chain nationwide—look for one near you). There are

more than 50 masala spice mixtures at a tiny Indian store 3

miles away. Nine sour creams in a local Latin supermarket. The

number of such products that have been creeping into Whole

Foods, Costco, and Walmart is heartening. When local shops

don’t provide, there’s the infinitely expanding array of global

pantry shelves that is the internet. For those living in small

towns or rural areas, the web is the global pantry, the delivery

truck the last-mile version of a 16th-century ship just in from

the Malabar Coast, bearing cardamom, cloves, and nutmeg.

 Of course, as cooks we’re interested in what these products

can do for us, tonight, for dinner. Fascinated by and respectful

of traditional uses, we are always looking for something new.

This is the American way, one supposes, until one eats in a

Tokyo spaghetti shop, with its uni and pasta and mozzarella,

everything quick-cooked in a wok, and realizes that cross-

cultural mash-ups define the history of much global cooking.

When we brush fish sauce onto ribs before grilling, we’re

mindful that we’re deploying an artisanal food whose roots go

back thousands of years. The ancient oceanic umami of the

fish sauce lifts and concentrates the beefiness of the beef. And

that is often the role of global pantry ingredients in our

recipes: to blend into a dish, to tie threads together and sing a

background melody. They boost flavors, add depth or heat or

fragrance or acidic zing, improve texture, or finish dishes on

an elusive, delicious note. This is their alchemical power. One

slice of Allan Benton’s profoundly smoked Tennessee Mountain

bacon does the flavor work of six slices of boring factory stuff.

By the time the sweet wine of Banyuls, France, has spent years

lounging in barrels to become Banyuls vinegar, a spoonful

generates an ethereal loveliness in a salad dressing or a sauce

that no industrial balsamic or red wine vinegar comes close to

matching. A dab of shrimp paste from Indonesia brings a

platter of sweet, slippery fried noodles to a place of gorgeous

flavor. A glug of oyster sauce makes the meatiest pot roast

ever.

Yes, the gift of time in a bottle usually costs a bit more than

cheap, bland, processed imitators. The deep deliciousness of

global pantry products reflects hard-earned skills and, often,

requires better ingredients. But many of these products are

used in small amounts and will last on shelves or in the fridge

or freezer for months. Many often come in small and light

packages, so they ship economically, especially if you have a

free shipping program or if you gang up several items in a

single order, which also cuts down on environmental waste.

How We Embarked on Our Global Pantry

Adventure
Way back in the ’80s, as a greenhorn writer backpacking in

Asia, Scott had lunch with a member of the Thai royal family in

a tiny seaside village outside Bangkok. Mom Rajawongse

Thanadsri Svasti was the most famous food critic in the nation

of gourmands that is Thailand, a former pop singer and soap

opera actor of national acclaim. He had grown up in palaces,

eaten the royal cuisine, but championed the roots of his

country’s food, with little notion of class. The point of the visit

to the fishing village was an exquisite lunch, but first, the

prince announced, there would be a tasting of fish sauces

made by local artisans.

 What Scott supposed about straight-from-the-bottle fish

sauce then was what a prairie-born child might suppose: ick,

fishy. Prince Thanadsri smacked his lips with each spoonful of

amber liquid and discussed with the beaming producers the

nuances of production and style that yielded different-tasting

sauces made a few hundred meters from one another. Stink

was there, of course, in the same way that Roquefort or aged

prime beef has the pong of enzymatic transformation, but also

sweetness and caramel-savoriness and a lot more: profound

qualities that we now know today by the word umami.

In Mississippi, about the same time, Ann was growing up,

daughter of a Korean mother who had come to the United

States with her husband, an American soldier, in the 1960s.

Ann adored boiled peanuts and bulgogi, fried catfish and

gimbap, gas-station potato logs and gojuchang-spiced ribs.

Later she would win a James Beard award for her account in

Cooking Light magazine of the complicated, sometimes

heartbreaking entanglements of her heritage. The article’s

title, “Mississippi Chinese Lady Goes Home to Korea,” conveys

the confusions that came with growing up in an area where

ignorant kids called her “some kind of Chinese.” To be

obviously foreign to most Southerners, yet not Korean enough

to many Koreans, created a dual otherness that mixed-race

children know well. (As her husband, Patrick, would tell her

many years later, “Ann, you are a Hyundai. You might be born

and made in America, but you are a Korean product.”) Yet the

Deep South, with some of America’s oldest and greatest and

most entangled cooking traditions, has always been, and

always will be, her beloved home. It was the place where the joy

of eating dialectically—Deep South, Far East—was understood.

This global/local mash-up heritage is the source of Ann’s

inspired recipe for smoky pimento kim cheese . The succulent

flavor-bomb mixture is flecked with funky kimchi (a food now

sold in her local Publix grocery store in Ann’s home,

Birmingham, Alabama). The pimento is smoked because, well,

because. The mass of sharp Cheddar goodness is given

unctuous unity by the king of American mayos, Duke’s. The

result is a quintessential American treat with global ambitions.

Why not scoop it up with the big krupuk—shrimp crackers—

that Scott fell for at the age of 10 in Java? The recipe suggests
you do, and we outline the fun job of frying those crunchy

crackers here .

About the year that Ann was born, Scott moved from

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to Surakarta, Java, when his father,

a doctor, took a job with CARE to teach in local hospitals. Back

home, “spicy” food had contained quantities of chile barely

detectable by laboratory equipment. At a meal at a Chinese

restaurant in Jakarta, the universe was revealed to be a much

richer, much more wonderful creation (and more painful,

when a tiny green chile eaten whole seemed hotter than the

sun). Soon, the family was eating Chinese frog’s legs in black

bean sauce, Sumatran fiery beef rendang, and Balinese stewed

duck. Over seven and a half years of living in Indonesia and,

later, Afghanistan, food-obsessed travel was the family’s

recreation, most of it in less-than-fancy restaurants, often

from food stalls and roadside shacks and the kitchens of kind

hosts.

In 2009, Scott and Ann met in Birmingham as food

magazine editors at Cooking Light, where Ann directed a test

kitchen that had developed thousands of recipes, many her

own. The magazine had a huge audience, and its goal was to

steer the concept of healthy American cooking away from

outdated low-fat rules and into the wide world of global flavors

and dishes where meat often played a supporting rather than

starring role. It was a time of fun and ferment. The Korean-

American Southerner introduced the ex-Canadian to field

peas, scuppernongs, properly fried catfish, Benton’s bacon, and

the finer points of bourbon-fueled porch-sit storytelling—and

to the milky Korean rice beer called makgeolli and the chewy
rice cakes called tteokbokki. Scott shared peanutty Indonesian

sauces, kecap manis–robed satays, salty palm sugar ice cream,

and the great Canadian tradition of the butter tart, which, he

maintains—heretically in the South, but with some converts in

Ann’s family—is superior to any pecan pie (the butter tart

recipe is enhanced with Southern sorghum syrup, a beloved

pantry star, more complex and tangy than the dark corn syrup

usually used in the frozen north).

The roots of the recipes in this book, in the end, reflect the

Heinz 57 cultural mash-up history of the authors. Our

approach is social, casual, and communal. That’s why you’ll

find lots of finger foods and snacks, grilled things, and cheaper

cuts of meat. The recipes are mostly lively fusions. The main

idea is relaxed cooking with big flavors, in the happy-family,

good-friends-eating-together way, tapping into the endless

joys of global flavor creativity. This is—with all those loyal

pantry helpers invited to the party—our idea of fun.

So Whose Flavors Are These, Anyway?

To cook from the global pantry
⁕ is to taste the umami of

human history, an infinitely tangled and often bloody story.

Imagine a brilliantly colored map, animating movement of

global foods. Bright arrows shoot this way and that,

representing flavor vectors that moved across time, space, and

cultures.

⁕
Remembering, first, that the American pantry has deep roots in plants and foods of

the Indigenous peoples, including iconic foods like maple syrup, blueberries, wild

rice, pecans, sarsaparilla, cranberries, and on and on. Such foods fueled early
explorers and colonizers, shared by Indigenous peoples and often stolen from them.

Pemmican was the original American energy bar, and the word is Cree.

On this flavor-vector map, sea and land trade routes—Asia

to the Mediterranean, China to Rome, across North Africa,

across pre-Columbian Central America—radiate as

superhighways. The ruts and wakes are deep, broad, ancient.

Carbon dating of Phoenician clay bottles suggests the spice

trade from Southeast Asia to Europe dates back 3,000 years.

Evidence of the storage of fermented foods stretches back at

least 9,000 years. Foods that could survive a journey over land

or water did, aided by all the tricks of pantry preservation,

following the migration of peoples as well as the returning-

home paths of plundering armies.

The origin story of any given flavor vector is not always

clear. Similar treats popped up half a world away. Consider fish

sauce—oceanic umami in a jar—a quintessential flavor-

alchemy powerhouse used in many of our recipes. The Romans

adored fermented fish sauce, as did the Greeks before them. In

Latin it was called garum. It flowed into Rome and out to all

points of the Empire. Containers were often branded.

Competition raged. Roman fish sauce barrels have been found

in Germany and England. A factory discovered in what is now

Morocco could produce hundreds of thousands of gallons of

the stuff per year.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, probably in the area now

called Vietnam, fish sauce also appeared, precisely when is

unknown, possibly adapted from the ancient fermentation

skills of the nearby Chinese, possibly locally invented, possibly

hauled as garum from Rome. Wherever it began, Asian fish

sauce streamed outward to become a staple of pantries all over

Southeast Asia, and related products are used in Japan, Korea,

and China today. Now, Asian fish sauce is profusely

manufactured, while garum, though still made in small

quantities in Italy, is more or less a historical footnote.

The energy of the great flavor vectors was uncontainable.

Even as Japan closed to the outside world for centuries, for

example, one trading arrangement remained, centered around

a tiny island, with the Dutch. It was Dutch ships, likely, that

took soy sauce to England in the 17th century and to New

Amsterdam in the 18th. Similar ships hauled Indonesian

treasures back to Europe from the islands the Dutch brutally

colonized; today, Dutch companies still make very good

Indonesian sambals, and the Indonesian rice table meal is

probably the best meal to be had in the Netherlands.

 As for American cooking—and here, again, we mean all the

cooking that happens in the country—it’s a long tale of flavors

from the tasty margins fighting their way into the blander,

dominant middle. To see how this worked, consider the story of

soy sauce. The soybean brew—fermented agricultural umami

in a bottle—is millennia old and among the most popular of

global pantry ingredients. In recent years, it has outsold both

barbecue sauces and hot sauces in the United States. Its path

from “exotic” curiosity to immigrant symbol of identity to

ubiquitous seasoning in Main Street Chinese restaurants to,

today, dipping sauce in $300-a-meal omakase sushi temples

traces the pain and triumphs of several cultures—Chinese,

Japanese, and, later, Korean—whose people helped build the

country but were repeatedly barred entry by laws and

discrimination, and sometimes criminally interred even when

they were citizens.

In 1918, a Japanese immigrant named Shinzo Ohki started

the Oriental Show-You Company of Detroit. Show-You was a

play on the Japanese word for soy sauce, shoyu, but Ohki was

clearly bent on capitalizing on the first breakout dish of Asian

cuisine in White America: chop suey. We have an undated copy

of a 24-page Oriental Show-You recipe booklet, an early

example of what is now called content marketing (today, Ohki

would surely be on Instagram). It begins with a recipe for

“Japanese Chop-Suey (Sukiyaki)”—served on toast if you didn’t

have rice—and proceeds through various chop sueys to an egg

foo yung, a chow mein, and other noodle dishes, and then

sprinkles in Spanish rice, meatloaf, and baked beans. Was this

appropriation, pandering, or canny outreach? No, it was