Sources

Appears in

#27Momofuku
Momofuku

By David Chang and Peter Meehan

Published 2009

  • About
My answer about sources—about what ingredients are and where to get them—is pretty simple: Google it. What’s a dried scallop? Google it. Where can I buy Kewpie mayonnaise? Google it. We Google for information all the time at the restaurants. And while you can’t trust everything you read on the Internet, you can find a lot of helpful information there.

The most important ingredients to worry about getting your hands on are fresh top-quality meat, fish, shellfish and vegetables. Whatever kind of local market you have access to—be it seasonal or year-round, as sprawling as the one in Santa Monica (where I’ve seen four kinds of Asian pears) or as modest as the one I saw in Madisonville, Tennessee (where the live country music was awesome)—is the place to start. Cook with vegetables in their seasons if you can afford to. The results will be better.