Ersatz Cooking - Kitchen Substitutes for the Expat Cook

The problem with moving from country to country is that ingredients for food you like to cook and your family like to eat can be hard to find.  Sometimes you have to use something else instead – some substitutions work remarkably well, others change the taste a little.

Many of the hints and tips on my Ersatz Kitchen page explain how to get around things like baking without baking powder etc but here is a collection of substitutions that, while handy, are not complex enough to merit their own blog post.

Fish Sauce:  Useful for a lot of Asian cooking.  Substitute a mix of soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce.

Palm Sugar:  Again popular in Asian dishes.  Muscovado sugar is a suitable alternative.

Ketchap Manis:  Necessary for Nasi Goreng and many Malaysian and Indonesian dishes. There is no real substitute but it is easy to make your own.  Heat Soy Sauce and Brown Sugar in a ratio of 1:1 until the sugar starts to dissolve.  Add water (.5 ratio) diced ginger a star anise and a cinnamon stick.  Continue on the heat until the sugar is completely dissolved.  Strain and store in the fridge.

Crème Fraiche: substitute high percentage sour cream for savoury and marscapone for sweet dishes.

Marscapone:  If you want to make Tiramisu but can't find Marscapone you can substitute a block of cream cheese mixed with sour cream and heavy cream - start the additions reasonably small and add more to get the taste and consistency you want. 

Lard: you can use butter, goose fat or strained bacon dripping depending on whether you need a savoury or sweet recipe.

Zaatar:  mix thyme, majoram, oregano, toasted sesame seeds, salt and sumac to taste.  Adds flavouring to dried tomatoes and is very tasty when mixed with olive oil and toasted on pitta. 

Koekkruiden:  Dutch mixed spice – a mix of Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Allspice, Ground Cloves, Ground Ginger, Ground Cardamom, Ground Star Anise and Ground Mace.  I use in a lot of baking recipes that call for mixed spice.   Also tasty in recipes such as Christmas Pudding and Mince Meat. 

Shortening:  substitute butter or lard. 

Buttermilk: you can make butter and buttermilk by agitating raw milk in a sterile jar until it separates out.  This is time-consuming but a great activity for a kid who wants to ‘help’!  Alternatively add a tbsp. of lemon juice to milk and leave on the counter for 15 minutes to curdle.

Galangal:  This is used to impart flavour in a lot of South East Asian cooking.  If you do not have any you can substitute ginger.

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How to make sun-dried tomatoes and substitutes for creme-fraiche

There is a restaurant chain in the UK called Zizis which does a particularly tasty creamy chicken dish.  It has recently been posted on their website and the family requested that we eat it over the weekend.  Unfortunately the recipe called for two ingredients that are simply not available in Astana – Red Pesto and Crème Fraiche. 

Normally sour cream is not a good alternative to crème fraiche because it is less stable at high temperatures and can split during cooking.  Here in Astana dairy products come in a bewildering array of fat percentages and the greater the fat content the more stable the cream so a cream with about 30 or even 40 % can take the place of crème fraiche in a cooked recipe.  Marscapone is also a possible alternative for crème fraiche.  By choice I use marscapone in sweet dishes and sour cream in savoury. 

We can get green pesto here but red pesto is an unknown quantity in our supermarkets.  I tend to make my own pesto in any event because I prefer the fresh taste.  I rarely measure out the ingredients but put equal parts of basil, parmesan and pine nuts, a clove of garlic, some salt and pepper (I like pink pepper) in the processor with some extra virgin olive oil and it is done.  I have not yet tried making the pesto with rocket but a friend mentions that it is very tasty and my guess is it would work with almost any fresh herb in place of basil. For red pesto I add a similar measure of sundried tomatoes.

Fresh red pesto

Sundried tomatoes are also not readily available in our supermarkets but can be made at home.  The cookery shops in Europe sell fancy dehydrators to do this but an oven works just as well.  I halve some baby tomatoes and scoop out the seeds.  I sprinkle the cut sides with salt and leave them for about an hour to draw out the moisture.  I then wash and dry them before spreading the cut sides with a mix of minced garlic and zaatar (you could use oregano instead) and then drizzle olive oil over the top.  The tomato halves go into the oven at 100 degrees for about three hours.

Before 

After

Once they are ready they can be used to make red pesto or put in a sterile jar in extra virgin olive oil.  They are also devilishly moreish and make a good snack.

Sadly the substitutions and the need to make the sundried tomatoes turned what would have been a quick throw-together recipe into quite a protracted day of cooking.  That said the results were delicious.  I made some extra sundried tomatoes so the next time the recipe will come together much faster.  I might also try the recipe with a green pesto sauce.

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The delicacies we leave behind

Everybody on the expat circuit has some delicacies from home that they pine for.  After writing about shopping in Kazakh supermarkets I started thinking about what I cannot live without.  I think, because I have moved around all my life I am both lucky and unlucky in this regard.  Most countries I have lived in have left me with some absolute 'must have' item that I miss when I leave.  This gives me more to miss but also means that I am used to doing without a lot of the things I love.

Some things are more difficult to get than others.  My favorite food is a gammon roast - not easy to find in some places.   Pork Products can be difficult to source in the Middle East and expensive when you do find them, I did find gammon here in Astana but when I cooked it it turned out to be ordinary pork - quite pleasant but not what I was looking for.    But then you always miss what you cannot have: in Nigeria we could get a most amazing array of local fruits but we could not get apples.  Every time I came home for the holidays I would bring a bag of them with me.  My mother would slice and freeze these.  I don’t recall that we ever used these in baking or fruit salads but single slices would be taken from the freezer as a special treat on difficult days.

When I was very young my favourite treat, on visiting my relatives in Ireland, was to eat a Creme Egg.  This is a deliciously disgusting Easter confection popular in the UK and Ireland consisting of low cocoa chocolate and creamy fondant.  Even today I have to limit myself to just one as they are incredibly addictive.  I have found a recipe for homemade eggs but they are even more lethal than the processed version.  100% sugar!

Ontbijtkoek from the Netherlands, a real favourite with me but
I have to make my own if I want to eat it.

My current 'must haves' are the things I go and buy straight away as soon as I return to a certain country.  In the UK it is a gammon roast and Aussie Mega shampoo, in the Netherlands a Krokett and Ontbijtkoek with a trip to the pharmacy for some Henna Plus hair balm.  When I am in Turkey I stock up on Lokum, Apple Tea and Mavi jeans (to my mind the most comfortable jeans in the world).  I have not been back to Nigeria or Venezuela since we moved away but were I to return I would make a beeline for a can of Limca (a sour lemon fizzy drink which comes, originally, from India) and churros respectively.  My husband really misses red Leicester cheese (a typical English cheese that is excellent on sandwiches) and pickles/chutneys.  I sometimes make a batch at home to use on sandwiches although perhaps not as often as I should.  We were thinking about what we will miss when we leave Astana - my husband will miss the very tasty shashlik (grilled kabab style meat) and I will miss pelmeni, a ground meat dumpling wrapped in thin dough.

Many of my British friends love Marmite (I cannot stand the stuff and was almost ill the one and only time I ate it), this is difficult to buy outside of the UK, other items my British friends seem to miss are Cadbury's chocolate and biscuits such as Bourbons and Custard Creams.  Rather inexplicably plain black tea seems to be on the list, although it is easily found just about everywhere in the world.  My English relatives joke that I just cannot understand how important the right tea is, an English tea company even exploited this habit by using it as the joke in an advertising campaign they were running - quite funny but oh so true. My Dutch friends have similar difficulties finding delicacies from home. 

Good old fashioned English scones are another yummy delicacy we
have to make at home.

As the world becomes smaller and supply chains easier to manage it becomes easier for supermarkets to devote sections to expatriates.  Many British supermarkets have a Polish Section for Polish expatriates living and working in the UK who want a taste of home.  Most large British towns have an oriental supermarket and online retailers will ship anywhere in the world.  I have a catalogue that lists all sorts of delicacies that can be delivered anywhere in the world but this ends up being very expensive so we tend to live on what we can get in the local supermarkets without hankering too much for what we can't.  I do, however, stockpile a little, when I first arrived in Astana I could not find muscovado sugar, it is easy enough to make a substitute but when I found it in stock one day I bought four kilogrammes.  I have not seen it since so it was a good call.    

Every now and then, however, it is great to have a treat or to lift the spirits so I stuff the empty corners of my suitcases with treats and keep one or two packets of biscuits stashed away at the back of a cupboard.  We all need to feel a connection with home from time to time whether it is apples in Nigeria, custard creams in Astana or Ontbijtkoek (Breakfast Cake), Kroketten or  Hagelslag (Chocolate sprinkles for sandwiches) just about anywhere outside of the Netherlands.

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Sugar Sugar: How to bake without specialty sugars

I had a wonderful afternoon yesterday as a friend invited  seven or eight of us over for tea and cakes.  She had made a wonderfully tasty chocolate fudge cake (my favorite) and a bannoffee and lemon meringue pie.  Yumm.  It is always good to meet up with friends because, to a great extent, they stand in for your family when you are abroad.

During our meet up talk turned, for a while, as it always does to what you can find in the shops and how to cope when you can't.  I mentioned that I had seen some caster sugar the other day and was immediately asked for details of where and when I had seen it.  Caster sugar is quite rare here and usually you have to bake with granular sugar.  I have written before on baking without baking powder and without baking chocolate but sugar is a fairly key ingredient to any cake.

Granulated sugar is easy to find

I have got used to using granular sugar, as it is not difficult to turn it into caster sugar - just put it through a coffee mill.  My food processor came with a special mini mill which I use for this purpose.  Just blitz it in 15 second bursts to make sure that you do not over process.  I usually just blitz enough to use on the cake I am baking at that particular time but I sometimes do a bulk load for friends who do not have a mill.

It is easy to make your own caster sugar

Icing sugar is easily available here and in most places.   I have made my own in the past, usually when I have realised that I had forgotten to buy the powdered sugar in the shops and had no time to go and get more.  Just blitz the sugar to a very fine powder (checking at 15 second intervals) and then add 1 tablespoon of cornstarch for every 250g of sugar.

Muscovado sugar is one of my favorite baking ingredients, it makes a lovely toffee sauce, works brilliantly in a lot of banana recipes and when combined with orange juice and mustard powder gives a tasty glaze to ham and is a must when cooking red cabbage.  Muscovado sugar is like gold dust here in Astana.  I found some in the supermarket last year and bought four kilos.  I am nearly out of it now.

All is not lost, however, because I can buy molasses here.  If you add about 2tbsp of Molasses to ordinary baking sugar to get a good replacement for muscovado sugar.  Alternatively you can replace Muscovado sugar with ordinary brown sugar.  There is less moisture in brown sugar so you may need to check your recipe and add a little more liquid.  In places where molasses has been impossible to find I have used honey or maple syrup in its place.  The recipe tastes different but not unpleasantly so. 

One of the problems of using muscovado sugar is that it gets hard very fast.  I am always careful to store mine in airtight containers but it still gets hard and my four kilos became rock solid very quickly.  I know that it is possible to re-hydrate it by placing some slices of apple or bread in the container with the sugar (remove once moist).  I usually forget to do this, if I remember that I need it the night before baking I will cover the sugar with a damp kitchen towel and leave it overnight.  If I forget that I soften it in the microwave, this takes care because the sugar can get too hot and melt or burn.  Place it in a container and put a glass of water beside it.  I usually zap it in 30 second intervals checking if it is soft in between.  In extremis (my microwave was broken) I have just used it as is without softening but using the grater to break up the larger pieces., I probably should have used the food processor.

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No chocolate - no problem, easy and quick substitutes

One of the lessons my home economy teacher drummed into me at school was that I must never use ordinary chocolate for cooking.  She never explained why but my guess is that it is due to the high sugar and low cocoa content of eating chocolate.  

I have seen huge 5kg bags of cooking chocolate buttons on sale at the cash and carry here in Astana, but I rarely use cooking chocolate.  I prefer to use a really good quality dark chocolate in my cooking, it is usually possible to buy 75% or even 90% chocolate very easily here and this gives excellent results and you don’t need to reduce the amount of sugar in your recipe.  Good chocolate like this melts very easily or you can chop it into chips.  I now use my food processor to do this but for many years my kitchen was too small to accommodate one and I used a mezzaluna to good effect.  Aside from saving my wrists I find the real advantage of the food processor is the by-product. 

Chocolate chips in the food processor.

As well as the chocolate chip rubble you get a considerable amount of powdered chocolate.  I love hot chocolate, it is one of my real failings and I add the powder to warm milk to make a really luxurious drink.  If you are using very high percentage chocolate you may want to add some sugar - I like my hot chocolate strong and bitter, my husband has to have sugar.  This is the sort of luxury product you pay over the odds for if it comes in a packet, in fact you could, if you are that way inclined, get some natty cellophane packages, ribbon and labels and make up some gift packages.  I can usually not bear to part with the extra.

Luxurious hot chocolate is a tasty by-product.

I never bake with ordinary milk chocolate as I find that even the best quality eating milk chocolate is too sweet.  The quality of milk chocolate is also very variable, popular brands such as Cadbury’s (UK) and Hershey’s (US) have very little actual chocolate in them.  Not at all pleasant to cook with and probably explains why supermarkets in those countries carry an extensive range of cooking chocolates. 

If very sweet milky chocolate is the only stuff available you can still use it.  Look for the highest level of cocoa solids you can find and remember to cut the amount of sugar in your recipe.  Substitute the milk chocolate for the cooking chocolate on a 1:1 ratio and then remove 1 teaspoon of sugar for each 6 grams of chocolate so, if your recipe calls for 100g of sugar you will need to remove 16-17 teaspoons of sugar from your measured weight. 

If I can only find milk chocolate I prefer to make my own cooking chocolate.  It is very easy to do and I speak from experience when I say that the ingredients are available almost everywhere in the world even in the middle of the African bush.  All you need is butter and cocoa powder on a 1:1 ratio.  1 table spoon of  butter combined with 1 tablespoon of cocoa is equivalent to about 25 grams of solid chocolate. 

Simple ingredients make a good substitute for cooking chocolate.

Just melt the butter (I use a microwave but otherwise place a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water without letting the water touch the bottom of the bowl).  Sieve the cocoa powder into the butter and whisk together to a smooth paste.  

The paste can be used immediately or kept until later

You can either use this directly in your cake mix or pour it into a container lined with baking paper or buttered cling film and refrigerate it for later use.  Remember that because this is butter based it will melt at room temperature so it has to be kept in the fridge.

Once set keep in the fridge until needed.

Don't be tempted to eat this, it does not have a pleasant taste on its own but it does give a wonderfully chocolaty flavour hit in any cake.

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Ersatz Expat - Baking Without Self Raising Flour or Baking Powder

I truly enjoy baking but as an expat it can be a bit more of an adventure than baking at home.  In the UK or the Netherlands I just run down to the shops where I can buy... self-raising flour, caster sugar, muscovado sugar, chocolate chips, flavour extracts, shortening, ready chopped nuts... the list is endless.  In many other countries it can be more difficult to get the ingredients together.  Sometimes they are not all available and the ones that are may come in a different form and so need some work before they can be used in the recipe.

I have found that expat bakers fall into two categories – the ones that get frustrated by the substitutions and the ones that turn it into a bit of a treasure hunt.  I love experimenting with substitutes, and a lot of friends ask me how to swap ingredients.  It was the inspiration for my blog's name and I thought I would do a series of posts on how to substitute in baking and cooking.

How to make your own self raising flour.

One of the few things you really do need for baking is baking powder.  Self raising flour is quite difficult to source in most parts of the world so you have to add baking powder to the flour to make your own. 11/2 teaspoons per 125g of flour.  

When I first arrived in Astana a fellow expat told me that baking powder could not be bought in Kazakhstan and had to be brought from home.   I did not believe her; after all it is possible to buy cakes here so there must be baking powder. That said, I could not find any translations in my dictionary and there were no tubs of anything that looked like it in the supermarket so I did start to think that my confidence had been misplaced. 

I decided to ask a lady in the cake section what I needed to add to flour to make the cakes.  She must have laughed herself crazy at my gesticulating and at my pigeon Russian.  Nevertheless she very kindly took me over to the baking section and handed me a small packet of baking powder which is called  Разрыхлитель Теста in Russian, problem solved.  I had been looking for the large tubs that are common in the UK and last for years.  Here the baking powder comes in small 7-10g packets.  When you think about it this is a much more sensible way to package it as it means that the powder will be used before it goes old.

Baking Powder, the name can be confusing on some packets because the lower case t is written m in Cyrillic

If you can't find baking powder you can make your own - just add Baking Soda and Cream of Tartar in a 1:2 ratio.  Baking powder is a mix of alkali (baking soda) and acid so if you are really stuck you can use lemon-juice or white vinegar instead of cream of tartar in a 1:5 ratio with baking soda instead of 1:2.  You need to be really careful with this though as you may need to adjust the amount of liquid in the mixture and you will almost certainly have to add a little more sugar.  Add the substituted soda/acid mix to the cake batter just before putting it in the oven.  With commercial powder the chemical reaction works in two stages, the first on the bench and the second in the oven.  With a home-made substitute the chemical reaction will start straight away.

Ingredients for emergency baking powder, 1 tsp soda to 5 tsp lemon juice.

Baking Soda and Lemonade starts to work quickly so use it immediately.

Be prepared for your cake to fail if you use this method, my success rate has only been about 50% but it is worth a try.  I find cupcakes work quite well because there is less work for the raising agent; if you use lemon juice instead of vinegar you have a lovely base for a lemon drizzle cupcake.

Cupcake made using baking soda and lemon juice instead of baking powder.