/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>6330440
For reference, one of these stores sells 35 different varieties of hot pocket.

>>6330440
I've never seen a grocery store here that doesn't sell most basic ingredients. You don't even make sense.

>>6330440
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand

>>6330440
I'm sure they have it anon. Sometimes those website searches don't work worth shit.

>>6330463
Literally all the local grocery stores only sell corn starch, as pictured. No other kinds. I also had an awful time trying to find lard, only one store in my area carried it and it was shoved into a small dusty corner. These are ingredients we've used for thousands of years but US grocery stores don't stock them, probably to make room for more varieties of Oreo cookie.

We have 61 varieties of oreo cookie.

>>6330474
Website search for these stores is the entire database because it has a "shop from home" feature on each site. I called to make sure and no one has any.

>>6330481

American here. Every grocery store or supermarket that I've ever shopped at has both corn starch and lard. You sound like you've found an outlier.

>>6330481
Your local stop and shop sucks, holmes. Mine definitely sells all the basics, but is pricey as fuck so I go to the Asian market. Or based Market Basket

>>6330533
They have corn starch, but they don't have any other type of starch.

>>6330538
I'm going to have to go to the Asian market to get the shit I need.

Try searching for flour

>>6330440
For a moment I thought the name was "Smegmans"

What's the difference between wheat starch and wheat flour?

>>6330629
What's the difference between corn starch and corn flour?

>>6330546
>but they don't have any other type of starch.

Very strange. My local markets have corn starch, all sorts of versions of wheat flour, rice flour, mung bean flour, arrowroot flour, etc.

You tried searching by "flour" instead of "starch"
You check the import section (asian/Indian/Palistani)?

>>6330634
Don't know, I've never heard of corn flour, nor wheat starch. It's either corn starch or wheat flour.

Congrats, you've found out you can't see the normal necessities sold by grocery stores online.

>>6330634

For most foods, "starch" and "flour" are synonomous in the USA. So if you can't find "rice starch" try searching for "Rice flour" instead.

In the case of corn it's a bit more complicated. Corn flour could be referring to corn starch, or it also could refer to masa (aka ground, dried, nixtimalized corn)

>>6330634
This is the difference between a flour and a starch. A starch is a very fine powder used to thicken things, you can have starch from pretty much any plant. I have bags of many different kinds of starch in my pantry, but no wheat starch. I know where to get it.

>>6330654
Starch and flour are different, you retard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornflour

"Corn starch ('cornflour' in the UK), the white, powdered starch of the maize grain"

It was Britain all along. The arbitrariness will never cease to amaze me.

>>6330481
Nice anecdotal evidence.

Just because you can't find something in one grocery store you went to doesn't mean that it isn't stocked in any grocery store in the entire US.

>>6330683
They're fucking retarded over there. Flour is flour, starch is fucking starch.

>>6330685
I live in New Jersey, if it's not here, it's not anywhere except for niche markets or places with high amounts of immigrants.

>>6330667
>Starch and flour are different, you retard.

Yes, I know that. My point was that some people do not realize this and use the terms interchangably. It's especially an issue when you are shopping in the foreign section of a market and the labels are poorly translated from Chinese or Hindi or whatever else is on the package.

I buy mung bean flour often. Depending on where I buy it from the label might say "bean starch" or "bean powder" or "bean flour" or one of them even says "starch flour"--but in all cases it's the same product in the bag.

Nobody is trying to tell you that starch and flour are the same thing. We are telling you that they might be named incorrectly, so if you aren't having any luck with your online search using the word "Starch", try using "flour" instead.

>>6330685
Did you even look at the OP pic?

>>6330667
In my understanding flour is basically ground grain while starch is the polysaccharide extracted from a plant.

>>6330695
I've never had this problem in Asian markets. Flour and starch are so obviously different and no self-respecting Chinese housewife would dishonor her family by mixing them up.

>the most basic ingredients to make anything worthwhile from scratch
>wheat starch

Pick one. I'm shocked that this thread is pretending wheat starch is an important ingredient.

>>6330695
Except wheat flour is normal flour. It wouldn't be labelled that way.

>>6330715
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO THICKEN MY CUSTARD APPROPRIATELY WITHOUT IT TASTING LIKE CORN OTHERWISE FUCK

>>6330714
>self-respecting Chinese housewife would dishonor her family by mixing them up.

Clearly. But it's not the self-respecting chinese housewife you have to worry about, it's the person who made the nutrition facts label on the product. I see it quite often where the original product wasn't packaged for sale in the US, but it requires a nutrition label to be sold legally. So there is a sticker applied to the package which contains the nutrition information in English. Quite often these stickers have horrible quality "engrish" on them.

>>6330741
Products with foreign labels are not sold at any of the listed grocery stores except Wegmann's, and their selection of imports is extremely limited.

Obviously if I went to my local Asian market they'd have what I'm looking for. But it's like 30 minutes away.

Well I looked it up and the wheat starch equivalent is used in Chinese cooking (in Japan it's also called ukiko, but it's not really a commong ingredient) but rarely in western cooking. Instead in the west we use corn starch, potato starch and arrowroot starch. The verbal distinction between starch and flour isn't universal though, with some places calling corn starch cornflour, while some others like Sweden calls potato starch potato flour.

So yeah I guess that's the explanation for not finding wheat starch in supermarkets, it's simply not a common item. In fact a google image search on wheat starch returns almost exclusive chinese packages.

>>6330750
your asian store is a 30 minute walk away? HA mine is 3 minutes away.

>>6330756
I'd like to know the linguistic history of this. It's amazing how we can't agree on words for two very different things, especially when mixing them up when cooking would have disastrous results.

>>6330759
>walk

>>6330756
>>6330764

>>6330721
>making weeb shit
I knew it. Pack it up everyone. Just another idiot

>wheat starch

They're only looking out for you. That shit will kill you.

>>6330721
>Except wheat flour is normal flour. It wouldn't be labelled that way.

Correct. I was talking about all the other "starches". Who would go to an Asian market to look for plain flour? I assume you would buy that at a normal market and the go to the Asian market for the things you could not get there, such as the more exotic starches.

>>6330785
>Who would go to an Asian market to look for plain flour?
Asians
>I assume you would buy that at a normal market and the go to the Asian market for the things you could not get there
Why make two trips? Flour is flour.

Is everyone just going to ignore the fact that we have 63 different kinds of Oreo?

>>6330793
>Asians
Baking bread isn't really an Asian thing. Half of my local asian markets don't even stock wheat flour. The others do, but they have American brands for 3x the price of what the supermarkets charge.

>>Why make two trips? Flour is flour.
Agreed. But I would assume the majority of the posters here use the normal supermarket as their go-to shopping place and then only visit the Azn market on occasion, for the stuff they can't get at the normal market.

>Is everyone just going to ignore the fact that we have 63 different kinds of Oreo?
I agree that is silly as fuck, but honestly I didn't think it was worth talking about, especially compared to your complaint that you couldn't find basic ingredients at normal supermarkets. Man, I agree with you that a lot of the processed foods are way out of control. But at least in my experience it's equally ridiculous to claim that you can't get basic ingredients at a supermarket.

>>6330440
Of course they do, sure some items may be more uncommon but I'm quite sure most ordinary grocery stores have most things you need. You either haven't searched well enough or live in one very strange place.

>>6330829
Yeah I usually go to Big Y but if it's closer/I just feel like going somewhere different or I know they have what the other place doesn't have then Shop Rite. Shop Rite usually has the best selection to me. There's other places like Stop and Shop here or other no name local grocery stores but they tend to be not as great to me. I also like a lot of what Trader Joe's has but it's just to far away to go often at all.

>>6330829
>Baking bread isn't really an Asian thing
Have you been to an Asian market with a bakery? I can assure you they most certainly bake bread and a million other things.

>>6330931

Yeah, my normal go-to Asian market has a small bakery inside. But what's ironic is that that one doesn't even carry normal flour at all.

>>6330935
Is it just small? If that's the case maybe their customers don't bake much and just pick up baked goods there.

>>6330721
corn starch has no flavor you mung bean

>>6330949

I think this market in particular doesn't even try to compete with the "ordinary" supermarkets nearby. There is very very little overlap between their inventory and the typical market. For example, they have a meat counter, but they only have the "odd cuts" like liver, tripe, tendon, pork blood, chicken feet, stock bones, and so on. You would never find, say, chicken breast, ground beef, or a steak there. Their produce section has all sorts of fresh southeast asian herbs (grown locally). They also have too many Chinese vegetables for me to bother listing. But you want an apple? Nope. Lemon? Potato? Carrots? Nope, none of that stuff.

In contrast, the larger Asian markets that I sometimes visit (but a longer drive away) stock all that, but they have the "normal western" stuff too.

>>6330954

Right. He wants corn starch. But if he used corn flour instead then his custard would taste like corn.

Fun fact: X-flour contains proteins and other stuff from X as well as the X-starch. X-starch is X-flour less the protein and all the other things.

Wheat starch is wheat flour less protein and all the other things.
Cornstarch is corn flour (not cornflour, two different things) less protein and all the other things.
Potato starch is potato flour less protein and all the other things.

Second fun fact: with few exceptions, there is little-to-no-difference using X-starch, Y-starch or Z-starch in any given recipe that calls for one of them specifically. I have used potato starch in place of cornstarch in recipes with no change in the final dish. Same with wheat starch. Some "starches," however, behave differently because they're not true starches. A true starch has amylsomething and amylsomething else as its components while other "starches" have glycsomething and glycsomething else as their main components (or other things).

>>6330440
Go to an Indian/Pakistani/Persian grocery store. They will carry wheat starch. Or use cornstarch.

>>6330956

no offense but you sound pretty dumb. You went to an Asian store... not a regular supermarket with a big Asian aisle, but a fucking REAL DEAL asian store where ASIANS go to buy ASIAN shit.

of course they don't fucking have steak....

I went into an Indian market the other day, and they had a shitload of weird beans and okra and some other green shit... but didn't have tomatoes or cucumbers or anything else normal.

It's just how shit is, man, go to a white people store.

>>6330468
Rekd

>>6330969
>of course they don't fucking have steak....

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. I shop at asian markets often. The larger ones carry a lot of overlap with a western grocery. Heck, my favorite one (Hong Kong Mall on Bellaire in Houston, TX) is larger than a Wal-Mart.

What's also odd is that many of the things that Asians would want are NOT stocked by my local market. For example, they have all sorts of hard-to-find herbs that the places in Houston don't carry, yet you can't get a lime there? Any thai or vietnamese wanting to use those herbs will want limes too.

I was pointing out that this particular asian market is even more limited in their inventory than most are.

>>6331017

you can get limes anywhere, so they don't carry it. They carry the hard to find stuff. I shop at Russian stores all the time. They only have Russian shit there. If you want Apples, you go to the supermarket. If you want weird russian fish jerkey, you go there.

it's just about picking your niche...


in fact, don't you realize a Supermarket or convenience store (a store that has everything in one place, one stop shop) its a recent invention. Like 20-30 years ago you had your Milk man, your water hole, your produce trader, your butcher... they were all diferent people and/or stores.

Stores just carried what they had immediate supply to - farmers sell what they grow, etc.

So you're like complaining that the specialty asian store doesn't have non-specialty items, its just weird to me why these thoughts don't pop into your head like they do into mine.

why are people bitching?
regular flour is fine for anything
just like corn starch is the only starch you'll ever need.
there's a reason why the other stuff is hard to find: you don't need it

>>6330538
>Market Basket

muh fuggin nigga

>>6331037
>its just weird to me why these thoughts don't pop into your head like they do into mine
Woah, it's like you're two different people!

>>6330440
Because wheat starch isn't a common ingredient in American cooking, so there's no demand for it.

Lard isn't a common ingredient these days either.