Accompaniments Category

A key ingredient in Salade Niçoise, these small purplish-black olives have a distinctive sour flavor. They're great in tapenades.

Nuoc cham is a Vietnamese dipping sauce. It has a fish sauce base.

These black olives from France are salt-cured, which makes them wrinkly and more bitter than standard lye-cured American black olives.

Olive butter is a mixture of olive oil and butter.

A staple of Mediterranean cuisines, olives are most often eaten out of hand, though cooks also use them to flavor everything from pizzas to martinis. Raw olives must be cured before they can be eaten, and the curing medium--usually lye, brine, or salt--affects their flavor and texture. So too does the olive's degree of ripeness when it's picked. Green olives are picked while unripe, which makes them denser and more bitter than brown or black olives, which stay on the tree until fully ripened. Olives become bitter if they're cooked too long, so always add them to hot dishes at the last minute. Opened cans or jars of olives should be refrigerated, but some olives can be stored at room temperature if they're submerged in brine or olive oil.

This is made by boiling the fruit and peel of oranges with sugar, pectin, and water. It manages to be bitter, sour, and sweet all at once, which many people find delightful.

This Cantonese dipping sauce is both sweet and salty. Look for bottles of it in Asian markets and large supermarkets.

Wrapping meats in these leaves helps tenderize them.

This is a heavy, silicone-coated paper that's used to line pans so that candies and baked goods won't stick. It's an expensive alternative to waxed paper, but it's less sticky, so it's a good choice if you're making gooey items. Parchment paper is also wrapped around foods to be cooked en papillote, or formed into cones for cake decorating. Specialty cooking stores and larger supermarkets often carry rolls or sheets of it. Paper grocery bags are sometimes recommended as a substitute for parchment paper, but it's not advisable to use them. Grocery bags will ignite at 450 degrees, and that they may have been treated with unsafe chemicals.

This goes especially well with ham.

Picholines are green, torpedo-shaped olives that are brine-cured. Those made in Provence are marinated with coriander and herbes de Provence, while American picholines are soaked in citric acid. They make great martini olives.

Pickle relish is typically a sweet relish of chopped pickled cucumbers. It is very popular in America on hamburgers and hot dogs.

To make your own: See the Pickled Asparagus recipe on RecipeSource.com.

To make your own: See the Pickled Beets recipe on RecipeSource.com.

To make your own: See the Pickled Carrots recipe on RecipeSource.com.

To make your own: See the Pickled Cauliflower recipe posted by the Internet Che.

To make your own: See the Pickled Eggs recipe on RecipeSource.com.

See the Japanese Rosy Pickled Ginger posting on RecipeSource.com.

To make your own: See the Homemade Capers recipe in the Internet Chef's Recipe Archive.

To make your own: See the Pickled Okra recipe on RecipeSource.com.

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To make your own: See the Pickled String Beans recipe posted on RecipeSource.com.

Pil pil is a basque sauce made from skin-on salted cod, olive oil, garlic and chili peppers. After cooking, the fish is removed and the reminder emulsified into a sauce. The pil pil sauce is them poured over the cod or other seafood.

This Hispanic paste is made from ground pumpkin seeds mixed with oil, chiles, sesame seeds, and other ingredients. It's used to make rich, creamy sauces.

This is a fiery Portuguese sauce. To make your own: See the Piri Piri Sauce recipe posted on RecipeSource.com.

Plastic wrap is terrific for covering foods to be stored in the refrigerator or cooked in the microwave. It clings especially well to glass, ceramic, and china dishes. You can also use it to wrap foods for short-term freezer storage, though you should use aluminum foil if you're storing something in the freezer for a long time since foil is better at preventing moisture loss.

These are mild Italian brine-cured black olives.

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These small, thick wrappers are stuffed with meat fillings, and then pan-fried and steamed. While assembling the potstickers, keep the stack of wrappers moist by covering them with a damp towel. You can seal the potstickers with a "glue" made with cornstarch and water. Look for stacks of them wrapped in plastic in the refrigerator cases of Asian markets. They freeze well.

These are lemons that have been preserved in a salty brine for one or two months. They're a staple of Moroccan cuisine and somewhat hard to find in the U.S.