The Mala Project Is Now ‘The Mala Market Blog’

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Twice-cooked pork by The Mala Market

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 Project causes confusion online, and 2) only one of our brands makes any money and allows us to keep on blogging, and it’s not the Project!

So our new writing and recipe platform is at blog.themalamarket.com. All links that you have saved to themalaproject.com should transition seamlessly to blog.themalamarket.com. But please let us know if you discover any that haven’t!  We’re also in the process of changing our social media accounts, which is an even harder slog than changing the blog name, but we should eventually be fully transitioned to The Mala Market. 

I finally made peace with this change when I realized that the Project has in many ways been completed. It started as “a challenge to myself to move beyond my usual Chinese recipes and cook my way through my prized collection of Sichuan cookbooks—the rare, the out-of-print, and the printed-only-in-China—which are full of food the way it’s made in Chengdu, my favorite place to eat.”

I did not by any means cook my way all the way through any of them, but I did cook and learn quite a lot from the Sichuan Higher Institute of Cuisine’s cookbook. I still consult and cook from these cookbooks, but more often nowadays I create my own take on Sichuan dishes I have eaten recently in Chengdu and at great Sichuan restaurants in the United States.

Sichuan food, like all living cuisines, changes over time in such a way that no cookbook can keep up.

One example of that is my revised recipe for huigourou, or twice-cooked pork, which I first cooked in 2014 according to the SHIC’s recipe. It was fantastic, but since then I’ve realized how it can be even more fantastic. Every time I have this dish in Sichuan, it is crowded with leeks in almost equal amount to the pork. So I’ve reworked my recipe to reflect that (see photo at the top of this post), and it’s oh so much better. I’ve also changed my cooking method a bit, and I almost always serve it with little steamed bao now, as they do in Chengdu. But I haven’t messed with the perfect sauce of fermented-bean flavorings (doubanjiang, sweet wheat paste and preserved black beans).

Sauces for twice-cooked pork
The three fermented sauces that give twice-cooked pork its super-umami: preserved black beans (douchi), chili bean paste (doubanjiang) and sweet wheat paste (tianmianjiang).

My other goal with The Mala Project when I began it in 2014 was to learn to cook for my recently adopted teen daughter from China. I have—more or less—accomplished this goal. Putting a Chinese meal on the table most nights still challenges me sometimes, but the goal now has transitioned more to being one of teaching Fongchong to cook the food of her homeland.

The Mala Market girls in Hanyuan, Sichuan
The Mala Market girls this summer in Qingxi Town, Hanyuan County, source of the world’s most famous Sichuan pepper

We will continue to publish Sichuan recipes and China food and travel writing just as we always have. But we have another great adventure coming up as we import and brand our own products in the final quarter of this year. That’s a huge and risky endeavor for us, but we’ve had problems with quality variation and inventory shortages when there were too many middlemen.

In fact, let us apologize for currently being out of stock of our most popular product, red Sichuan pepper, and therefore also out of our Mala Collections. Rather than source what’s left of last year’s crop from a source that turned out to be less-than-reliable, however, we are holding off on restocking until our supply of fresh, 2017-harvest Sichuan pepper arrives from Chengdu in a few weeks. Going forward, a direct line to the growers and/or processors of our products and thorough knowledge of the supply chain should allow us to bring you the very best Sichuan specialty products on a consistent basis.

Thank you for your continued patience and support through our learning curve. We’re very proud of the community of Sichuan-food lovers that has coalesced around our blog, and we hope you’ll stick around for the next chapter at The Mala Market!

About Taylor Holliday

The Mala Market all began when Taylor, a former journalist, created this blog as a place to document her adventures learning to cook Sichuan food for Fongchong, her recently adopted 11-year-old daughter. They 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 mother-daughter team eventually began visiting Sichuan’s factories and farms together and, in 2016, opened The Mala Market, America’s source for heritage Sichuan ingredients and Chinese pantry essentials.

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18 Comments

  1. This is so exciting! I love that you are creating your own brand of products, so smart. And the Mala Market is such a great name. Glad you have come to peace with it as you embark on this next adventure! Can’t wait to follow along.

    1. Thanks so much, Julia! Really appreciate your support and feedback. It’s challenging being a one-woman (and one-girl) shop…

  2. When I first your blog I thought you were somehow associated with The Mala Project in NYC, where I’ve eaten several times. I love your recipes, all of the ones I’ve tried are great. I’ve made a vegetarian version of mapo tofu many times now and my friends, and I, love it. I’m nearing the end of my first package of douban jiang and will be opening the new one soon.

    I used to think Chinese food was something you went out to eat at a restaurant. Being we have none of any worth in my little upstate NY village, it was only when I went to NYC that I got to explore. Now I’m eating authentic Sichuan food all the time. I don’t know if it’s the ingredients, the combination of flavors, or what, but this is the best food. Thank you so much. Keep up the great work.

    I hope you’re working on a fabulous cookbook. We only need more “home-style” recipes. ❤️

    1. I love to hear all this, Cheryl! It bolsters my excitement about the food and recipes when others are excited about them too.

      I finally ate at Mala Project and got to know the owner a bit, and both were great experiences. They make a mean dry pot, and I wish them the best of luck while also looking forward to not sharing a name with them. 🙂

      Thanks for writing!

  3. Congratulations and thank you very much.
    Living in San Antonio area, it is difficult to get a good selection of Asian food items. Now there will be another option. Yay!
    BTW, I fell in love with char siu bao back in the early 80s. I never thought of serving it along side a main dish. That’s why I’m still learning!!!
    _ga-

    1. Thanks, Gregory! Serving the plain, steamed, foldover buns with this dish means you can make little pork sandwiches out of it. It’s kind of like char siu bao, but replacing the bbq pork with twice-cooked pork. Either way, you can’t go wrong with pork and fluffy yeast bread!

  4. In my opinion, it was a wise decision to consolidate your websites.

    I enjoy reading your blog and shopping for your products; however, having to switch website was tedious and, at first, slightly confusing.

    1. I’m glad to hear that, Dennis. Technically, it is a challenge, because you can’t have a Shopify (e-commerce) site and a WordPress blog on the same domain. We did a tech workaround, and I hope it will help with those difficulties. I will continue to try to better integrate the sites, and I welcome your feedback.

  5. Enjoy reading your recipes and comments. I am in Australia amd would really like to purchase some of your produce! Maybe soon?

    1. We would love to sell in Australia, but shipping charges would be outrageous. But thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll have luck sourcing products locally.

  6. I love your blog Taylor, whatever you wanna call it I will be here! lol, cant wait for all the new recipes inspired by your trip this summer! And hopefully new goodies for the online shop! We cook with you! Greetings from the hot and sweltering (hurricane free for now) Caribbean

    1. Thanks, as always, Paula! Really appreciate your support, and I love thinking about you cooking Sichuan in the Caribbean. Hope you and yours were not too affected by the storms.

      And, yes! I need to get working on the recipes inspired by our summer travels. Soon!