Jay International Food Co. is the adventure park of grocery stores. A souk for the spicy, the hot, the bitter and the sweet. A bazaar where each crowded aisle speaks of cultures and countries far from St. Louis. It’s the world at your
shopping cart.
The produce section alone is a seasonal shopper’s portal to the cuisines of the world, and no doubt what helped earn it Sauce readers’ votes as favorite international market. Here you’ll find every vegetable you could possibly want for curries, stir-fries, hot pots, soups and stews. “You can’t make a stir-fry without a trip to Jay’s,” said Dan Kieran, a customer who regularly makes the jaunt from his home in the Benton Park neighborhood. “No other bean sprouts come close for freshness and crunch.” In fact, the perky white sprouts, with their creamy bean caps, are grown fresh each day in the store.
Jay often stocks vegetables you may not have known existed. Like Chinese flowering chives with delicate white buds on foot-long stalks of deepest green. Or Chinese water spinach, which is actually not spinach but a member of the morning glory family. With bright-green, sword-slim leaves, this handsome vegetable is even more nutritious than Popeye’s traditional favorite.
Look for dragon fruit this summer. The skin of this alien-looking fruit is hot pink, studded with fluorescent green spines that sprout from the fruit body like tiny kites. Despite its fearsome appearance, the dragon fruit is sweet and tart, like ripe pineapple combined with the tang of a star fruit and the seeded texture of kiwi.
The market also stocks unfamiliar varieties of familiar vegetables, like the green-and-white-striped Thai eggplant, the slim purple Japanese variety or the glossy Indian kind, often called by their British name aubergine, as round and small as golf balls. The texture of these smaller eggplants is dense, the seeds small and easily digestible, the flavor sweet. Plus, the thin skins are edible, without the bitterness you sometimes find in the larger, more common Italian type. Fresh Chinese celery is a must-try for adding a kick to soups and stews. It looks a bit floppy, thin-stemmed and very leafy, but there’s nothing flabby about its punchy flavor. Use all of it – stem and leaf.
If curries are your passion, Jay is your store. Habañeros, Thai dragon peppers, red and green serranos, and fat green jalapeños tumble out of bins and shine in cellophane-wrapped trays. Ginger roots, fresh and solid, with thin skins and few blemishes, fill a large bushel basket. Papery white skins hug tight to large, firm garlic heads.
Pinkie-sized, brown-ringed roots I didn’t recognize turned out to be fresh turmeric. Finding turmeric fresh is unusual, so I asked Jay’s vice president, Noy Liam, how his customers use it. “The fresh turmeric mashed for curries gives a stronger taste than the powdered spice,” he said, “but most of my ethnic customers buy it to use as traditional medicine.” Another glimpse of a world I rarely see.
Gosh, there’s so much to try. The extremely warty Chinese and even bumpier Indian bitter melons. Sinuous, dark-green, earthy Chinese long beans. Fresh fava beans with fat, lime-green pods. Taro roots. Yellow, white and purple yams. Jícamas so fresh and flawless you want to run your hands around their flattened globe shapes. Aloe leaves as long as your arm and thick as your wrist, full of jelly for drinks.
If you have a yen to try Jay’s produce, but you don’t know squat about chayote or beans about kabocha, don’t stress. There are plenty of books, the Internet and Jay’s staff to enlighten you. Or just shop for the adventure of it all.
This article appears in Jul 1-31, 2007.