The Hakka Pantry

You can make many dishes from this book with a few basic ingredients: all-purpose soy sauce, dark soy sauce, Chinese rice wine, fresh ginger, garlic, various cuts of pork, tofu, bean sauce, fresh vegetables, and long-grain rice. You’ll find most of these ingredients, or suitable alternatives, at a well-supplied supermarket. Look for the vegetables at a farmers’ market. To add more Hakka flavor to your cooking, seek out an Asian market to find some of the preserved ingredients, such as Chinese sausage, Chinese bacon, salted mustard greens, Tianjin (Tientsin) preserved vegetable, fermented black beans, preserved mustard greens, preserved radish, and red fermented bean curd. Large Asian supermarkets found in areas with major Chinese populations offer most of the ingredients called for in these recipes.