Issue date: November 12, 2000

Last week's Best of the Web

Where on the Web

Where's truffle oil when you need it?

Sites that sell hard-to-find cooking supplies and ingredients.

ere's a familiar quandary: You're cooking coq au vin for a holiday feast, and the recipe calls for a quarter-teaspoon of sea salt. Or maybe your gourmet Italian dessert recipe specifies a dash of sambuca. Your first question: What is it? Your second: Where do I get it?

People who rely on their local grocery chain for cooking supplies know the choices can be limiting. While upscale and ethnic foods are slowly gaining ground in previously gourmet-starved regions, it's still tough to find obscure ingredients, like truffle oil and wasabi powder, at your corner grocer.

We took the search online to e-grocer Cooking.com, whose specialty foods store is an excellent place to start looking for that elusive spice or sauce. Some of the goodies that are offered here: Bobby Flay's ancho chile powder (for anyone who is dying to re-create the Food Network chef's spicy creations), and jasmine rice for aspiring Asian chefs. At food super-site Epicurious.com, you can locate a recipe for salad niçoise, look up "niçoise olive" in the site's online food dictionary, and then head to the Provençal pantry section to buy a jar from partner site Dean & DeLuca. (To browse the full Dean & DeLuca catalog of high-end specialty foods, go to deandeluca.com.)

For hard-to-find ethnic foods, your best bet is ethnicgrocer.com, a site that lets you shop by country for foods from Turkey, Korea, India and Italy, among others. Click on the Recipes link to search for ethnic dishes by cuisine. Once there, you can add items to your shopping cart simply by clicking an item on the ingredient list. If you're into a specific cuisine, head to a specialty site such as Esperya.com, where you can order fresh mozzarella dripping in its own buttermilk, and other Italian delights.

More specialty food stores:
Tavolo.com Gourmet and international foods, and specialty cookware.
HarryandDavid.com Gourmet food gifts, plus fresh and exotic fruits.
iGourmet.com Specialty meats, cheeses and dry goods for delivery.
Mexgrocer.com Hard-to-find Mexican foods, from jalapeños to tomatillos.
QuickSpice.com Asian snacks, foods and cookware galore.

By Rula Razek, editor in chief of Internet Cool Guide (internetcoolguide.com).

My Web: Ming Tsai

Movers, shakers and their bookmarks

Ming Tsai, 36, host of the Food Network's Emmy-winning East Meets West, has an engineering degree from Yale, which might explain why he's such an avid Web surfer. A doting new dad who often visits babygap.com and ivillage.com, he likes to e-mail digital photos of his son. He relies on:

The Industry Standard (thestandard.com) for -- what else? -- cool food news. "There is a food and wine section where you can receive e-mails on the intersection of food and technology."
"I'm on the culinary council for ethnicgrocer.com; it's a great resource for getting recipes and ingredients."
"You might also find me at healthanswers.com, a solid health/lifestyle site, or redenvelope.com, which is a slick and modern site where you can buy unique gifts.

I also search for cars at edmands.com and bluebook.com."

-- Jennifer Mendelsohn