Food Pantry

What will you find in your food cupboard today? Be sure to stock the items recommended for a basic pantry and you will be able to prepare a great variety of international meals at short notice.

Explore this food pantry and cupboards around

It's time to take a look to your food pantry and fill it with ingredients to get your international cooking skills started. We are here to help you enjoy your world cooking experience by sharing with you what we know about ingredients, equipment, terms, tricks, tips and techniques.

Check our collection of world food articles. You will find detailed information that will help even a novice cook feel like a professional chef.

And, for those that are writing, we also store food words. Food lovers make use from a vocabulary on loan when describing food. Familiarity with all those words to describe food will come handy to describe your restaurant experience, together with your appreciation of the service, decoration, and general ambiance.

How to stock your international pantry

Explore the flavors of the world, revisit some well known traditional flavoring combinations and discover some you may have not thought of.

The basic international pantry should have a selection of the basic pantry items millions of home cooks all over the world store; the ones they use every day to prepare simple, straightforward dishes, very easy to replicate at home.

The Latin American pantry contains the ingredients to bring the flavors of Latin America to your kitchen. Discover what ingredients, herbs, spices and seasonings people use in Latin American countries.

Stock your Indian pantry with the right spices and food staples to be able to prepare any Indian recipe in a flash.

Search the Japanese pantry for the ingredients needed for this country's cooking.

Thai Pantry, the Flavor of Thailand in your kitchen. Thailand, a country where a meal means rice accompanied by other dishes. Flavors of Thailand, a look at the traditional ingredients used in Thai cooking.

Keep your favorite Greek ingredients stored in your cupboard. This is essential to explore and enjoy Greek cuisine.

Staple food

Cheese

This is a food item you will find virtually in every pantry wherever in the world.

Cheeses around the world, because cheeses take the characteristics of the country they were produced. France has Brie or Camembert, you will find Gruyére in Switzerland - without forgetting the cheeses of Mexico or Italian cheese. Not as popular or well known as wines, but you could travel around the world and label every country by its cheese. There are a great many kinds of cheese in the world, a tribute to the inventiveness of cheese artists. There is no single way to categorize all the types of cheese, and taste is individual, but there are some simple rules about how to judge a fine cheese.

Pasta

Pasta is another universal pantry item. Trying to think of a place where some kind of pasta is not used is indeed hard. A brief history of pasta tells you how this ancient food became world superstar an it is still modern. Once one learns the basics of this great food, it is not surpriging to find it in every culture. Every cuisine has pasta dishes, there is pasta around the whole world and you could travel all countries eating nothing else.

There are more types of pasta than there are cell phone ring tones. This is not true, right, but there are many types. Pasta comes in many shapes and you can discover the long and the short of it.

You better learn pasta preparation, cooking and serving tips from the pros to avoid problems. Though pasta might look simple to cook, there are potential problems leading to a soggy food.

Getting to a few pasta recipes, start with the most simple of all, spaghetti a la carbonara. Don't forget that, for pasta, the sauce makes the dish.