Ethnic Bounty : The Hunger for Exotic Foods Is Met by Stores Offering Conch, Tofu and Jicama and by Classes in How to Cook Them : Cuisine: The Valley has become part of a revolution in culinary life styles. Many of the new dishes come with the boom in immigration.

When Teresa Alvarado moved to Southern California from Mexico nearly 20 years ago, she soon discovered that local supermarkets did not carry many of the fresh ingredients that were the basis of her daily meals.

Chilies only came in a can. And when she searched for chorizo at the meat counter, all she found were row upon row of steaks, chicken parts and pork chops wrapped in plastic. So she adapted her recipes and relied on canned chilies for her relleno.

Today Alvarado, who lives in Canoga Park, is amazed at what she can pile into the shopping cart at her local grocery store.

Reaching for a bag of yellow-green tomatillos in the produce section of a Ralphs supermarket, Alvarado, 45, bragged about how easy it is to create authentic Mexican dishes. Most of the ingredients she needed were only a few feet away.

Wheeling her cart slowly between the well-stocked aisles of the international food section, she plucked a can of menudo from a shelf.

She admitted that she no longer makes everything from scratch. “But it’s good that it’s here if I want it,” she said, passing bags of rice and beans and chicharrones (fried pork rinds).

Amy Asai, 30, of Granada Hills remembers when it was hard to find tofu in Valley supermarkets. But today she says that although she sometimes drives to specialty stores in downtown Los Angeles or Gardena, her search for Japanese foods has been greatly simplified. When she shops at Hughes Markets in Granada Hills, she can choose among at least four different types of tofu in a freezer case brimming with Asian specialties--the makings for pot stickers and a colorful array of pickled vegetables, including pink radishes, red plums, white scallions, red ginger and purple eggplant, all of which can be washed down with various teas, from brown rice to Korean ginseng.

Alvarado and Asai are the beneficiaries of a quiet revolution within the food industry: The days of Salisbury steaks, apple sauce and peas are fading; the era of tamales, jicama and ginger is here. Ethnic is in, and supermarkets are feverishly restocking their shelves and bins to cash in on the trend.

Like retailers throughout Southern California, Valley grocers are adding an increasing number of ethnic products to their shelves to meet the needs not only of a growing ethnic population, but of shoppers looking for new gastronomic delights.

Supermarkets that didn’t even offer Indian chutney or Korean kim chee five years ago have nearly doubled the shelf space that holds international foodstuffs. Retailers are also hiring special buyers, promoting ethnic products in newspapers and opening up new specialty stores.

Ethnic food is a nationwide trend “that was taken to a peak in California because of the diversity of the people,” said Steve Koff, president of the Southern California Grocers Assn., a Los Angeles-based trade group with 1,200 retail store members.

Gloria Alvarez takes it one step further. The executive director of operations for the Mexican-American Grocers Assn., a 900-member organization based in Los Angeles, says ethnic foods in supermarkets are “more than a trend.” She terms them “a necessity, as the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods changes.”

Consider the following evidence of our changing tastes:

* Ralphs Grocery Co. has increased shelf space for ethnic foods 30% to 40%--depending on the store--in the past five years. The 133-unit chain, based in Compton, created a special buying department for such products, according to Robert Williams, director of ethnic foods, buying and merchandising.

* Five years ago, Lucky’s Markets, a 192-unit chain based in Dublin, Calif., launched a “neighborhood store” program designed to bring more ethnic foods into local markets. “Based on individual stores . . . space for ethnic food has more than doubled,” said Bob Sherrick, vice president for grocery buying.

* Vons Grocery Co. has created a separate group of supermarkets to cater to the needs of Southern California’s growing Latino population (see accompanying story). Called Tianguis, an Aztec word meaning marketplace, the super-size stores in El Monte, Cudahy and Montebello offer such items as fresh chorizos, salsas and tortillas. A Tianguis is in the works for the city of San Fernando.

* Food wholesalers such as Certified Grocers of California, which supplies more than 2,200 markets in Southern California, and Frieda’s Finest, one of the largest produce purveyors in the Los Angeles area, have created separate ethnic divisions to handle the growing demand. In fact, ethnic foods have become so popular at Certified that its seven-year-old ethnic foods subsidiary, Grocer’s Specialty Co., has seen sales double every year since its inception.

According to a report issued by Business Trend Analysts of Commack, N.Y., the potential for growth in the ethnic food market “surpasses that of virtually any other food product.”

Supermarket executives and buyers say a number of factors have sparked the changes in their aisles, first among them the continuing influx of immigrants into the area.

“Los Angeles is the new Ellis Island,” said David Hornbeck, a geography professor at Cal State Northridge and author of “California Patterns,” an atlas-like study of the state’s demographic growth from 1770 to the present.

Hornbeck, who is also director of business research at the university, said the ethnic population in the United States has grown faster over the past five years than it has over the previous 10, with California experiencing the fastest-growing immigration in the country today.

Los Angeles “is the largest Mexican city outside Mexico, the largest Korean city outside Korea, the largest Philippine city outside the Philippines” and the second largest Chinese and Japanese cities outside those countries, according to Tim Hammonds, senior vice president of the Food Marketing Institute, a 1,600-member, nationwide association of grocery retailers and wholesalers based in Washington, D.C.

According to experts, other factors that have spurred the ethnic food market include the popularity of overseas travel (up 58% between 1982 and 1987, according to the Department of Commerce); the recent surge of reports on food in the media; a new emphasis on nutrition that has led many diet-conscious Southern Californians to embrace a new cornucopia of healthy, low-calorie produce such as jicama, bok choy or enoki mushrooms; and the explosive growth of ethnic restaurants.

“Supermarkets have been inspired by the eclectic nature of restaurants in Los Angeles,” said Richard Martin, West Coast bureau chief for the New York-based Nation’s Restaurant News, a weekly business journal for the food service industry. “As we get more familiar with ethnic food, we experiment with cooking these foods at home. Food has become everybody’s hobby.”

Terri Johnston, 28, of West Hills says she is cooking more ethnic dishes, particularly Chinese-style stir fry, because she is trying to stay away from red meat. “My cooking has changed, and it’s easier to find more variety in food these days,” she said.

Beatrice Riback, 67, of Van Nuys agrees. She has given up red meats and saturated fats for fresh produce, poultry and fish. “You can convert almost any ethnic recipe to low fat if you’re willing to work at it,” she said.

Nowhere are these new foods more apparent than in the produce department--and the companies that supply those departments. Frieda’s Finest, for example, reports “consistent sales growth” in ethnic products.

About five years ago Frieda’s divided its ethnic foods into two lines: Asian products and “fiesta foods” from Mexico, South America, Cuba and other Latin countries. The latter, which included cactus leaves, chilies, cherimoya (a fruit from Ecuador), plantain, red banana and jicama (Frieda’s best-selling item).

Ten years ago, jicama, a crunchy white vegetable so popular in Mexico it is known as the “Mexican potato,” was relatively unknown in the United States. Today it is found everywhere from salads to hors d’oeuvre dips. Of the 200 to 300 letters Frieda’s receives each week, jicama gets the most mention, last year inspiring 2,742 pieces of mail.

“Jicama is tied into the diet consciousness because it is low-calorie, high-fiber, versatile and tasty,” said Frieda’s spokeswoman Anne Henry.

Ginger has enjoyed a similar growth in popularity. “A few years ago fresh ginger (part of the Asian line) was not that well-known here,” Henry said. “Now it is popular because of its flavor potential.” Other products in Frieda’s Asian line include snow peas, kumquats, shiitaki and enoki mushrooms and fresh water chestnuts.

Henry said introducing new items requires educating produce managers--as well as customers--on the art of displaying food and cooking.

Ralphs in Canoga Park has taken Frieda’s produce ideas to heart. When the 90,000-square-foot store opened 2 1/2 years ago, about 5,000 square feet was devoted to produce (about two-thirds more than the average Ralphs produce section). Some of the fruits and vegetables are displayed with tips on cooking, and a TV monitor offers short videos on preparing foods such as plantains and tomatillos.

There are tempting aromatic bins of fresh and dried chilies, a variety of squash, Asian vegetables like bok choy or roots of lotus, ginger, yucca, yamo imu and malanga (cooked and eaten like a potato, a sign advises).

Ethnic foodstuffs can be found all over the store. In addition to increasing the Latino line by bringing in Mexican brand names in everything from chocolates and cookies to detergents, Ralphs now has an Indo-European line that includes Indian curries, chutneys and pickled vegetables, Israeli dates and poppy seeds and Armenian tahini.

Three double-sided, five-tiered shelves in a section marked “international foods” offer more than 1,000 linear feet of specialty items from kosher matzohs to Chinese noodles. You can easily eat your way around the world: There are Greek sour cherries, Italian chocolates, soy sauce by the gallon, Mexican sodas, Japanese coffee, sushi seaweed sheets and Indian tandoori paste.

“I find myself doing more ethnic cooking today just to get some different tastes,” said Barbara Tarlau, 33, of Northridge.

Tarlau used to travel several miles searching for an Italian market to find the different Romano, Parmesan and ricotta cheeses she liked to use in her lasagna. Now, she just shops at Ralphs.

“The markets are doing a much better job of carrying ethnic foods,” she said. “I am constantly amazed at the variety of things you can find now.”