Earlier this month, Bomi Park was shopping for ingredients to make a dish that reminded her of home, in Korea. Dak-bokkeum-tang, also known as Korean spicy chicken stew, calls for chicken wings, drums, or thighs, Korean vermicelli noodles, ttoek (Korean rice cake), and other ingredients otherwise hard to find in your average St. Louis store.
A resident of the United States for more than 10 years, Park said dak-bokkeum-tang is one of her mom’s dishes she misses the most. One of its recipe’s hard-to-find ingredients: gochujang, a versatile sauce unique to Korean cuisine. In a post on the Mosaic Project’s Facebook page, Park, an assistant project manager for the group, wrote that its “spicy taste is very savory and addicting.” Park explained that she found the international pieces at Global Foods Market, a grocery store that offers provisions from more than 50 countries.
The post is part of a recent partnership between the international grocer and The St. Louis Mosaic Project. Led by St. Louis Economic Development Partnership and the World Trade Center St. Louis, the Mosaic Project aims to showcase and connect St. Louis’ vibrant immigrant population. Global Foods Market invited four of the initiative’s immigrant families to make traditional meals from their home countries—with ingredients plucked from their shelves—in an effort to teach St. Louisans about the different cultures that make up the community.
“Food is a source of entrepreneurship in the immigrant community, but it's also a way to build bridges between people,” says Betsy Cohen, executive director for the Mosaic Project. “When you serve food, you build relationships.”
Among the other dishes prepared in the collaboration, Mosaic Project member Chef Italucia Osborne looked to French, African, and Brazilian flavors for a traditional Brazilian meal, moqueca, a Brazilian shrimp stew. The recipe calls for 2 pounds of large shrimp, sliced tomatoes, cilantro, parsley, and green onions into a stew to be served with white rice and pirão, a yucan flour–made porridge.
In preparing taros (pictured at right, above), another Mosaic member and Kenya native Faiza Muhambi mixed the root vegetable (a common perennial plant in Kenya), with onion, turmeric, tomato, coconut milk, salt, and ginger garlic paste. (You can watch the process here.) She says the dish, beloved by many Kenyans, is often served for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and as a snack in between.
Taros, moqueca, and dak-bokkeum-tang are just some of the international dishes Cohen believes St. Louisans can try their own hand at with this extra time at home, especially if they’re visiting an international bazaar like Global Foods. “Even through these challenging times, you can experience a whole new kind of shopping mart, bring a recipe with you, and experience a different culture,” she says. “You can have that international experience and bring home the tastes of the world when you visit.”
“One of my favorite things to do when I’m at the store is walk around and see people from all parts of the world that come up to me asking, ‘Hey, I’ve never cooked with that before. How do you use it?’” says Shayn Prapaisilp, vice president of Global Foods Groups. “It's really a beautiful sight to see, especially with the kind of world that we live in now.”
For immigrants perhaps adjusting to living in St. Louis, the grocer provides a piece of home. For St. Louisans interested in diversifying their cookbook as colder weather will prompt more home-cooked meals, this collaboration might offer fresh ideas—and, hopefully, bridge relationships with international neighbors.
