Cooking Asian Inspired Food

Asian food is gaining more popularity for giving people a taste of the Asian culture!

According to Supermarket Perimeter, “Asian-inspired foods are making a big impact on consumers.”

New Food magazine predicted that, among Westerners, the Asian food inspired trend will continue.

Today’s inspiration is driven by the internet, social media, street food, fusions and word of mouth.

Asian cuisine includes a wide range of locations, such as China, Korea, Southern India, Vietnam, Mongolia, and Japan among others.

As the Asian American population continues to develop and evolve in the United States, so will the blending of traditional Asian flavors with contemporary ingredients of the U.S.

This fusion of traditional and contemporary has brought about a fast growing culinary category that can be referenced as – Asian inspired or Asian style.

Cooking Asian Inspired Food

Traditionally, Asian food is a meld of several tastes that includes, sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and bitter.

While western dishes tend to separate or isolate tastes, Asian cuisine highlights the fusion of flavors and textures, within a single dish.

Meatballs are a typical American dish, such as Spaghetti and meatballs (no meatballs are not from Italy).

Take those meatballs and infuse them with Asian flavors. And what do you get – Asian Inspired Chicken Meatballs with a Lemongrass Ginger Dip.

Asian Inspired Chicken Meatballs with a Lemongrass Ginger Dip

Asian Inspired Chicken Meatballs that are packed with East Asian flavors like ginger, garlic, soy sauce, cilantro and lemongrass.

Another favorite food in America is pizza. Pizza originates from Naples, Italy and has a long and interesting history. Pizza though from Italy is firmly set in American culture.

And that favorite food has collided with Asian flavors. Like this Asian Inspired Thai Chicken Pizza.

Thai Chicken Pizza

A pizza crust covered in a Thai-style peanut sauce and topped with mozzarella, shredded rotisserie chicken, shredded broccoli-carrot slaw, bean sprouts, green onions and cilantro.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, new findings show that chickens were first raised for food in Israel. Were as, in Southeast Asia and China, fowl was raised for cockfights and later raised for food consumption.

The magazine goes on to say that the popularity of chicken on U.S. plates has surpassed that of beef. Americans eat more than 80 pounds of chicken per person every year, according to the National Chicken Council.

And maybe that’s why a favorite Southern dish has been Asian inspired, and that dish is, Asian Style Sticky Chicken.

Asian Style Sticky Chicken

According to Southern Plate, “Sweet and sticky chicken is an old-fashioned Southern recipe that has been around for about as long as folks have been cooking.”

Take your sticky chicken to a whole new level with blood oranges. It is thought a natural mutation occurred in Sicily, Italy sometime between the 17th and 18th centuries, creating this unique red-fleshed orange.

Sticky Asian Blood Orange Chicken

As mentioned earlier, Southern India is part of Asian cuisine. And when we think of Indian food, curry comes to mind.

Curry is truly global. You’ll find it in places like the Caribbean, Thailand, South Africa, Japan, Great Britain and of course the United States. In each of these places a dish of curry will look and taste very different.

The way a curry dish is made in the for mentioned places, is very different to the way it is actually made in Southern India.

Curry is actually a generalization coined by colonizers of India to categorize foreign-to-them dishes.

As a matter of fact, curry powder is a British invention of convenience, as they discovered that combining basic spices like turmeric, red chili powder, coriander powder and cumin powder approximated the taste of Indian food, to which they had grown accustomed.

So it could be said, curry powder is Asian Inspired. Here are some dishes to enjoy using curry power.