Category: Noodles

How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / How to Cook With Tianmianjiang / How to Cook With Yacai / Noodles / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

May 29, 2014

Sichuan Dandanmian ft. Yacai (Dandan Noodles, 担担面)

Chengdu Challenge #1: First Love Dandanmian was the first real Sichuan dish I ever had, when Grand Sichuan International, the first real Sichuan restaurant in Manhattan in decades, opened close to my home in Chelsea in the mid-’90s. I’ll never forget the moment when they sat it on the table. It looked like a plain bowl of boiled noodles with some ground pork on the top, but then I realized I needed to stir it up myself and began to turn the noodles and crispy pork over in the pool of...

We are Taylor and Fongchong, and The Mala Market Blog is where we share our adventures in cooking Sichuan food. Our blog started in 2014 and eventually grew to include The Mala Market, America’s source for premium Sichuan ingredients.

Taylor is CEO, importer, cook and writer, and Fongchong is spice packager, translator and chief taster. One of us joined a new family in America at age 11 and refused to eat anything but real Chinese food, and the other one had to learn in a hurry how to cook it for her.

We’ve discovered through the years that the secret to making food that tastes like it would in China is using the same ingredients that are used in China. The Mala Market is designed to help American cooks do just that, providing premium and hard-to-find Sichuan spices and sauces as well as Chinese pantry collections.

Sichuan málà—numbing and spicy—is our shared, mother-daughter obsession, though, as in Sichuan itself, you’ll find plenty of mild recipes on our blog and non-spicy Chinese products in our shop.

We hope you’ll find both the ingredients and instruction helpful, and, as always, we look forward to hearing from you in the blog comments, on social media or via email through the little envelope icon on the main Mala Market page.

Read about sourcing premium Sichuan pepper and about the tortured path of Sichuan’s defining spice from Chinese farm to America table over the past 50 years in an article I wrote for the award-winning Roads & Kingdoms and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown.

“Sichuan pepper was banned outright for 37 years, then forced to endure unnecessary heat treatment for a dozen more—making it difficult for kung pao chicken, mapo doufu, and other Sichuan classics to wield their full numbing power for nearly 50 years in the U.S. And this whole time, there was ‘negligible risk’?”

Category: Noodles

Sichuan Dandanmian ft. Yacai (Dandan Noodles, 担担面)

SHOP The Mala Market

Subscribe

Welcome!

Fongchong and I tell her food story on the Southern Foodways Alliance’s podcast. (It also aired on KCRW’s Good Food.)