The Mala Market | Inspiration & Ingredients for Sichuan Cooking Blog

Chinese New Year / Fish & Seafood / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Laziji-Style Chongqing Lobster (Longxia, 龙虾)

A Mala Fish Fry We all know what it’s like to get inspired by a dish in a restaurant and feel you have to figure out its secrets for yourself so you can make it anytime the craving hits. My latest such obsession is Chongqing Lobster—though in this case I didn’t even eat it, but merely read about it in a review of New York’s new DaDong restaurant. But when I read this idea—Chongqing chicken where the chicken is replaced by lobster—I couldn’t get it out of my mind. How...

Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Black Vinegar / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Plant / Vegetarian

Cooking With Laoganma: Spicy Chili Crisp Potato Salad (Liangban Tudou, 凉拌土豆)

The Godmother Miniseries: Potatoes As many from-scratch recipes as I publish, what really drives traffic to my website is The Godmother, aka, Laoganma, whom I first wrote at length about in early 2015. People all over the world love these Guizhou-made chili oils as condiments and are also looking for ways to cook with them. So who am I to disagree? I have one very popular recipe on the site for LGM Black Bean Chicken, but I cook with both the Spicy Chili Crisp and the Chili Oil With Black...

Shui zhu yu (water-boiled fish) from The Mala Market

Chinese New Year / Fish & Seafood / How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Soups & Stews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Water-Boiled Fish With Tofu (Shuizhuyu, 水煮鱼)

Swimming Fire Fish Shuizhuyu, translated literally as water-boiled fish, may be the most misleadingly named dish ever. Far from swimming in a sea of water, the fish fillets float in a luxurious bath of mala spicy broth. Restaurateurs in the U.S. often give it a more fitting translation, the most creative I’ve seen being “swimming fire fish.” And yet, as I previously discussed when I published a recipe for shuizhu beef, shuizhu dishes are not as explosive as they appear at first sight. Yes, the main ingredient shares space with...

Chengdu mala hot pot (mala huo guo)

Restaurants, Travel & Interviews

How to Do Hotpot the Sichuan Way (Mala Huoguo, 麻辣火锅) | Jordan Porter

Expect Spice, Texture and Booze This week we have a dispatch from our man in Chengdu about the Sichuan hotpot experience. If at all possible you want to experience it in Chengdu or Chongqing, but he also gives some clues as to how to make mala hotpot at home. I’ll follow up soon with a recipe for the real deal. And we also have some dang-good, readymade hotpot soup bases in the Market.  By Jordan Porter—Hotpot has become the poster child for Sichuan cuisine and the intensity of its desire...

Miscellaneous

The Mala Project Is Now ‘The Mala Market Blog’

Change Is Good (in Life and Recipes) Dear friends of The Mala Project, From now on you’ll be hearing from Fongchong and me as The Mala Market. It was a tough decision to change the name of our blog, but we’ve heard from too many people that having two different “brands” is overly complicated. So we want to consolidate under one name, and there are at least two good reasons to go with “Market” instead of “Project”:  1) Having the same name as a restaurant in New York called Mala...

Non-Spicy / Pork / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

All-Purpose Pork and Pickled Green Bean Stir-fry (Roumo Jiangdou)

If Laab Were Sichuan As you all know, I did not grow up in Sichuan watching my mom cook dinner every night and learning her secrets for family-style, home-cooked food, and neither, for that matter, did Fongchong. Therefore, the Sichuan food I know and try to recreate here is generally restaurant dishes. Some of them are rather quick and easy, but most are not. However, we do cook quick-and-easy Sichuan food in our house, and this is one of those homey, any-night recipes I’ve learned on my own. Roumo jiangdou,...

Chongqing Chicken

Chinese New Year / How to Cook With Caiziyou / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / How to Cook With Huajiao / Poultry / Restaurant Classics / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Chongqing Chicken Like It’s Made in Chongqing

The Truth About Sichuan Food There vs. Here At last I’ve eaten Chongqing Chicken in Chongqing, and not only was it delicious, it was revelatory. This new recipe for the dish is based on the version I had there. It won’t be for everyone—a main ingredient is crispy fried chicken skin!—so I’m not replacing my previous recipe, which I created in 2015 based on memories of Chongqing chicken I had eaten in Chengdu, where it is known as laziji (chicken with chilies). I still like that version, but I want...

Miscellaneous

You Cooked It!: Sichuan Dishes by Our Readers and Shoppers

Happy Anniversary to Us The Mala Project (now The Mala Market Blog) turns three years old this month, and I am celebrating by thinking of all the dishes YOU have made from our recipes over that time. I would never have stuck with this time-consuming sideline if not for your genuine enthusiasm and support for the effort. It started out as a  labor of love, and you have made it even more so. So, a couple of weeks ago I invited readers to send me photos of dishes they’ve made...

Restaurants, Travel & Interviews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Paocai to the People: At Chengdu Restaurants, Free Homemade Pickles Are the Standard | Jordan Porter

A Pickle a Day By Jordan Porter—Holler out “paocai,” the Chinese word for pickles, at nearly any restaurant in Chengdu and the wait staff will deliver a bowl of delicious homemade pickled veggies to your table. I say nearly, because at some places the communal pickle jar (or urn, or bucket, or box) is self-serve, and you scoop them up on your own.  Either way, a house-made pickle comes standard at every restaurant in the city. The best part? It’s free! Pickled and fermented ingredients, from the famous douban paste...

How to Cook With Doubanjiang / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / Plant / Sichuan Pantry Compatible / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Mala Dry Pot With Cauliflower, Snap Peas and Bacon (Ganguo Caihua)

Weeknight Dry Pot I’m not sure y’all believed me the first time I shared a recipe for dry pot (ganguo or mala xiangguo), back in September 2015. Perhaps I did not convey how delicious it truly is. Or perhaps it seemed like too much effort. Or perhaps you’d just never heard of it—which is highly possible if you live outside China, where it’s been trendy for years. But dry pot is making its play in the U.S., moving out of the San Gabriel Valley to other places on the trending...

Beef, Lamb & Game / Chinese New Year / Cold Dishes / How to Cook With Chinese Spices / How to Cook With Dried Chilies / Restaurant Classics / Restaurants, Travel & Interviews / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Mala Beef Jerky (Mala Niurougan): Inspired by Houston’s Mala Sichuan Bistro

Award-Winning Sichuan A few days ago, Jianyun Ye, the chef at one of my favorite Sichuan restaurants, Houston’s Mala Sichuan Bistro, was nominated for a James Beard Award as Best Chef Southwest. Two other Chinese chefs working in authentic Sichuan restaurants owned by mainland Chinese restaurateurs also got regional Best Chef nods for 2017: Ri Liu at Atlanta’s Masterpiece (which we visit frequently) and Wei Zhu of Chengdu Gourmet in Pittsburgh. Check out those locations. Not NYC, SF or LA, but Houston, Atlanta and Pittsburgh. Dare I believe that all...

How to Cook With Sesame / How to Cook With Soy Sauce / How to Cook With Tianmianjiang / Noodles / Pork / Restaurant Classics / Southwest (Sichuan, Yunnan)

Introducing Chengdu Zajiang Noodles (Zajiangmian, 杂酱面)

Just Don’t Call It Zhajiangmian As we learned in the recent guest post from Chengdu Food Tours’s Jordan Porter, zajiangmian is one of Chengdu’s most popular noodles, a bigger, heartier cousin of dandan noodles and more-loved than its little cousin in modern Chengdu. I promised at the time to work on the recipe, and here are the results. But first, I want to share my closer-to-home inspiration: the zajiangmian at Mian, a real-deal Sichuan/Chongqing noodle shop in L.A.’s San Gabriel Valley. Opened by Tony Xu, chef-owner of the incomparable Chengdu Taste, it has...