Pan-searing a Modern Chongqing Specialty~~ I first ate Chongqing 烤鱼 (kǎoyú) in the underbelly of a Chengdu mall (real ones know it’s all about those random mall basement restaurants). That was back in 2015, and Chongqing’s explosive grilled fish scene has lingered in the back of my mind ever since. Buried between colorful layers of crunch, spice, fermented douban umami, fresh vegetables and sour paojiao, charcoal-grilled kaoyu takes the fiery flavor bomb of Sichuan hotpot and combines it with street food favorite 烧烤 (shāokǎo), Chinese barbecue. Naturally, Chongqing kaoyu is also known as 烧烤鱼...
A Poet’s Ode to Pork and Hongshaorou~~ Dongpo pork (东坡肉, dōngpōròu): pork belly cubes braised in soy sauce with ginger, scallions and other aromatics. If this is sounding a lot like red-braised pork (红烧肉, hóngshāoròu), don’t worry, it’s not just you. The number of Baidu search results for “difference between dongporou and hongshaorou” suggests that even Chinese people aren’t clear on the nuances. Here’s how I think about it: hongshaorou is your generic, workhorse pork braise. It can accommodate different cuts of pork; it can veer sweet, savory or spicy,...
Headfirst With Sesame Paste Dessert Rivers of salted, maple syrup-infused sesame paste sing throughout this miso caramel ice cream base. Molten sugar bronzes the quick-simmered milk and cream first; then, the same cornstarch that coats stir-fries in glossy velvet suspension turns this yolkless ice cream thick and creamy and ready-to-sling, straight from the freezer. The result: A perfect multitasking ice cream for this holiday season. It is as versatile as vanilla but a hundred times more glamorous. Spin a quart the night before a potluck and save yourself the mayhem...
Handmade Noodle Nirvana, aka Northwest China~~ This is another in our series about making famous Chinese restaurant noodle dishes not with the usual freshly made noodles but with premium dried noodles. If you have the time and skill to make hand-pulled, hand-ripped or knife-cut noodles on the regular, then you can stop here. But if you haven’t mastered Chinese noodle making and still want a damn good homemade version of spicy, tingly cumin beef on wide, ruffly noodles, then all you need is some high-quality dried mian in your pantry....
Guozao With Wuhan’s Famous À La Minute Sesame Noodles~~ In South-Central China’s landlocked Hubei province, the capital city Wuhan is beloved for its breakfast staples and snacks—chief among them 热干面 (règānmiàn) “hot dry noodles.” Served steaming and soup-less in to-go bowls with a barely-saucy coat of ground sesame paste and simmered house stock, reganmian was invented and popularized around 1930 by two local noodle shop owners, Li Bao and his apprentice Cai Mingwei. Now, reganmian is regarded alongside Sichuan 担担面 (dàndànmiàn), Shanxi 刀削面 (dāoxiāomiàn) knife-cut noodles, and Beijing 炸酱面 (zhájiàngmiàn)—not to be...
Universal Chinese Comfort Food~~ It doesn’t matter how far removed you are from the mainland in the Chinese diaspora: At some point, a relative made you this Chinese steamed egg dish, and now it reappears in your thoughts and dreams every time you’re sick or ailing. Flu? Steamed egg. Broken toe? Steamed egg. Strep throat in June the week before graduation? Steamed egg. Heck, I got a cavity filled at home last year and what did Ma make when I came back hungry and numb? Steamed egg. I grew up calling...
A Fully Stocked Pantry, So You Can Make Left-Behind Dishes~~ Newly added to our blog trove of under-appreciated mainland dishes is this recipe for 醋溜鸡 (cùliūjī), Sichuan vinegar chicken. Not red, not hot, not numbing nor loud, Sichuan vinegar chicken speaks to the range of regional cooking often left behind in the diasporic new world. No one is at fault for this. If you only eat Sichuan a couple times a year, I’m sure you want your favorites—the quintessentially, exaggeratedly, unmistakably Sichuan flavors everyone associates with the province. And if you’re...
A Classic Jiangnan Cold Dish~~ It’s a rare occasion that I get to write a Jiangnan recipe with zero familial baggage. Blame the Methodists who converted my family into teetotalers sometime in the late 1800s, but when I called my mother to ask about Drunken Chicken, she asked, “Is it made with 酒糟 (jiǔzāo)?” Close, but no. Drunken Chicken (醉鸡, zuìjī), a stalwart of the Chinese poached chicken oeuvre, is made by marinating cooked chicken in 黄酒 (huángjiǔ), yellow wine—most famously the huangjiu from Shaoxing, Zhejiang Province. Jiuzao refers to...
Shortcut Suancaiyu~~ When it comes to weeknight 酸菜鱼 (suāncàiyú), spicy and sour Sichuan fish (yu) with pickled mustard greens (suancai), even devout cooks need the occasional shortcut. Like most fish dishes on the mainland, suancaiyu uses whole fresh fish. And try as one might, Ma simply won’t be found buying, killing and gutting live fish on a Tuesday. Not that there’s much live fresh fish to be found around those parts—what suburbs have in 4-bedroom family homes, they lack in specialty fishmongers. So, we use fish fillets. No, it’s not the...
Another Homestyle Sichuan Dish~~ In the anthology of childhood tastes, 蚂蚁上树 (mǎyǐ shàngshù) was long buried for me beneath louder crowdpleasers like 红烧排骨 (hóngshāo páigǔ) or 红油抄手 (hóngyóu chāoshǒu). “Ants climbing a tree,” its literal translation, are so named for the way finely minced accoutrements cling to the 粉丝 (fěnsī), gelatinous tendrils of mung bean starch noodles imitating tree limbs. Yet mayi shangshu took me years to miss, or even think about. It’s only now that its discreetness amid redder, oilier, spicier stalwarts appeals to me so highly. This is...
A One-Night Homestyle Special~~ Consider this classic Sichuan dish the next time you want to impress a table: 蒜泥白肉 (suànní báiròu), thinly sliced pork (“white meat”) smothered in a red-oil garlic-paste concoction. The hardest part of suanni bairou is slicing the meat, and even then, the tantalizing red oil dressing hides any number of shoddy knife-work sins. Balanced by the fresh crunch of raw cucumber—or my favorite, spring celtuce, pictured above—your guests will be too busy sopping up every last drop of sauce to notice how simple suanni bairou really...
Finger-Licking Flavor~~ Have you ever had the famed toothpick lamb at L.A.’s Chengdu Taste or Sichuan Impression? Or perhaps at another of the ever-growing list of stellar Sichuan restaurants in our land? If you have, you probably wish you could make these crispy lamb nuggets adorned with a cumin–chili–huajiao spice mix at home. If you haven’t, believe me, you want to make them at home. We’ve been chomping on these on every visit to Los Angeles for years, but I’ve never actually had them in Chengdu and never seen them...
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Welcome!
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 MalaMarket 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-winningRoads & Kingdomsand 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’?”
Fongchong and I tell her food story on the Southern Foodways Alliance’s podcast. (It also aired on KCRW’s Good Food.)
