Photo Credit: Courtesy

Nicole Elsasser

 

People who know a thing or two about food can often be heard saying things like “Good food starts with good ingredients,” or “For the best food buy the best ingredients you can afford.” And they’re advice is sound.

 

It makes a ton of sense that in order to make delicious food, you want to be working with the best raw ingredients you can get your hands on. That said, knowing how to recognize the good stuff from the mediocre swill you can pick up at any old supermarket is a touch harder. But once you have the tools to select the best food to cook with, you will doubtless notice a dramatic improvement in your cooking.

 

Firstly, supermarkets are perfectly acceptable places to get certain ingredients (like packaged cooking staples that don’t vary depending on where you get them from ie: condiments), but a good thing to get used to is spending a little more money to get food from vendors specializing in that area like getting your bread from an actual bakery or buying meat from a local butcher rather than buying it precut and wrapped around Styrofoam.

 

Any Guelphite serious about making their food better through buying quality ingredients would do well to develop a close intimate relationship with the Guelph Farmer’s Market. One stop there on a Saturday morning, can equip you with an assortment of in-season produce, fresh eggs, meat, bread and more. It’s a good idea to develop a friendly relationship with the vendors at the farmers market because they will always have a better sense of what’s good that week and can even offer some helpful advice on how they would cook the particular things you are planning to buy.

 

As much as some people like to do one gigantic grocery shop every few weeks, the best thing to do for quality food is to shop often, making many well-thought out stops. Buy things like flour, spices, rice, sugars, nuts and other food of the like from a bulk food store with a high turnover. Especially with spices and nuts, freshness is key. Buy these types of food in small amounts and try to use them up quickly.

 

A well-equipped kitchen most will most likely have several different kinds of oils to be used for various purposes. A lot of food-enthusiasts will wax poetic of the importance of buying quality olive oil. This isn’t simply snobbery. Having a good-quality olive oil will make a difference in certain dishes where the subtleties of its flavour can be detected. The best thing to do is invest in a bottle of good quality olive oil and use it only for making salad dressings and drizzling it on top of finished dishes and soups. That way you can keep a cheaper bottle of olive oil for cooking, when the flavour is less noticeable.

 

By no means is this a comprehensive look at the ins and outs of using quality ingredients but these are small changes that you can easily make to ensure an improvement in your cooking.

 

 

 

 

 

Your anonymous comment may be printed in The Ontarion's print publication.