As Cart and I didn’t want to lug too much things in Singapore, we decided to get our ingredients in the Singapore supermarkets instead.
Last evening, we have been going practically all around Singapore trying to find the ingredients for the open house this Saturday. First we were at Fairprice Xtra in Jurong Point, and then we headed to Giant in IMM and then finally we headed to Cold Storage in Holland Village.
Check out the stuff that we got, this is just a fraction of the entire marketing!
And we were not finished yet! There are still a couple of final ingredients to get. Thank goodness I still have my scooter with me to take us around speedily.
While it was easy to find certain ingredients, I have to say that, I’m quite surprised to see that its not that easy to find even decent substitutes.
Like mozzarella. I needed these for making my lasagna. But I wasn’t able to find the soft, fresh, ones that I was used to and instead we found this solid one. Cart was extremely amused to see this hard type of mozzarella cheese in Fairprice Xtra.
This was because, mozzarella in Italian, is actually a term where you cut the cheese using your hands making it have the drop-shape. Nevertheless, this would still be fine since the cheese will melt in the lasagna in the end.
Interestingly, while I’ve always had the impression that Xtra would be the high end heartlands supermarket where you can find a lot of unique items, but it was actually the Malaysian brand, Giant that had more variety of items that we needed.
We found Savoiardi biscuits here.
And these are actual Italian brand savoiardi. And these will be used in the making of our Tiramisu!
And cocoa powder. Strangely, we couldn’t find them in Xtra.
We also found parsley in Giant.
Fresh ones aren’t that easy to find actually because the ones that you’d see normally in your regular Singapore supermarkets are Chinese Parsley aka Coriander. It’s not the same thing.
And we also found tomato sauce (not ketchup) made of just tomatoes with no other added ingredients, there was also mascarpone, and other stuff that I can’t remember at the moment.
But I was still missing a couple of ingredients! Can you believe that there were no frozen spinach to be found? Also no ricotta cheese? I was confused and asked for help online.
Luckily, there were some lovely people letting me know via twitter on where to find these ingredients. And the consensus was, to go to the supermarket where most of the expatriates live.
Thus we headed to Cold Storage Holland Village. Cart himself commented at how similar it looked like to Italian style supermarkets but I’m not too fond of these chi-chi supermarkets though. Since the prices tend to be on the high side.
But nothing prepared me when I saw this :
One bloody mozzarella costs 10 SGD?! I could get twice of that in Rome for about 3 euro! I mean come on, how much can the price be for transporting it? I normally use about 2 when cooking for Cart and me. So, hypothetically if I used these to cook for 20 people, it’ll cost 100 SGD alone without adding the cost of other ingredients.
If you were there at Cold Storage last night at about 10pm or so, you’d probably have witnessed me screaming.
No. I didn’t get them by the way. But just imagine how much louder my scream would be like if I had to.
Sidenote : Final call! Open house at my place! Free food! Freebies! And gifts to be won! Please RSVP!
I’d suggest trying the gourmet marts like Huber’s Butchery and Jones the Grocer at Dempsey for similar stuff. Cold Storage Jelita stocks a good number of Italian stuff as well. But if you want real stuff imported from Italy, the best place is a little Italian deli at the basement of Orchard Central.
have you tried carrefour? if i’m not wrong they have stalls that sell cheese..
Marina, I hope you didn’t ‘screamed’ when you saw the prices of Mascarpone in supermarkets ;( I almost fainted when I saw it was about $15 for 500 grams.. when in Venice it costs only 2 Euro for 500 grams 🙁 4 yrs ago, the mascarpone costed only $10.. how price flies!
We’ll pass on the open house party. Thanks, anyway.
Your story reminds me of a pair of shoes I wanted to buy for my wife one time. They were running shoes. In Singapore, the price was 280 SGD. I looked online and saw the same pair for sale in the US for 79 USD. I could express mail a pair of shoes from the US to Singapore and the price wouldn’t be that high. /shrug
It sounds like you’re going to have a really cool party, or had one, if this was your New Year’s Eve party, rather than your New Year’s Day party?
Happy New Year Marina! Tell Cart we said hi.
That’s a lot of stuff! Hahaha. I prefer Cold Storage over NTUC, really. I go to JP’s Fairprice Xtra a lot and I’ve come to realize that they run out of stuff quite fast.