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At the start of the pandemic season, when isolation was new, my family scoffed at my peanut butter sandwiches slathered with sriracha, shingled with pickles. Then they ate them and were amazed at the sweet, salty, fiery-crisp softness of the combination. Bowls of warm white rice followed, adorned with pats of butter and drizzles of soy sauce: savory sweetness once more. Curried tuna salad with mango chutney came next, griddled sausages dabbed with excellent mustard, quesadillas swiped with fiery avocado salsa, pasta dotted with olives and capers, draped with anchovies, showered with red-pepper flakes.
It has been more than a month now of preparing three meals a day, a serious run even for a recipe merchant, and I’m thankful more than ever for the saving grace of condiments: spicy, salty, acidic, sweet and savory alike. There’s mayonnaise on everything now, mixed with gochujang for fillets of fish, with ketchup for burgers, with molasses or maple syrup for turkey sandwiches. I pour vinegar with abandon.
Above all, though, I deploy store-bought chile crisp, a hot pepper sauce that generally relies on fried shallots and garlic for texture, and on any number of umami-rich special ingredients for distinction and oomph. It’s magical: a boon to noodle soups and kitchen-sink stir-fries, to eggs and cucumbers, to plain steamed fish. The mother brand is Lao Gan Ma, which started making the sauce in China’s Guizhou province in the late 1990s, run through with monosodium glutamate and a faint whisper of sugar. You can order a bottle online for around $9. I prefer Fly by Jing, an all-natural variety nearly twice as expensive and perhaps three times as good, the shallots, garlic and blistering pepper flakes suspended in Sichuan rapeseed oil, then turbocharged with fermented black beans and fresh Sichuan peppercorns, mushroom powder, dried seaweed, ginger and who knows what else. You could spread that concoction on a mitten and be very happy with your meal.
Jenny Gao, born Jing Gao, started Fly by Jing a couple of years ago on Kickstarter. Gao, 32, was born in Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, and grew up serially across Europe as her professor father moved from university to university, until the family finally settled in Toronto. She has since lived in Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai and lately Los Angeles, but considers herself Canadian above all. “It’s so diverse,” she told me recently. “Toronto was the first place I lived that let me feel as if I had one foot in the West and another in the East.” She worked in microfinance, brand management and business development before landing on the idea of bringing the flavors of regional Chinese food to the world in their purest form. “The global hierarchy of taste has traditionally placed Chinese food at the bottom of the pyramid and told us that it must be cheap,” she said. “But our hypothesis was that people would pay a higher price for better value, better ingredients, better taste.”
Some 2,500 people, she says, signed up to get one of the first jars. Gao has since added a dumpling sauce to her online store, along with a fiery-numbing mala spice blend (excellent on popcorn), fresh dried Sichuan peppers and three-year-aged doubanjiang, a paste of broad beans that can elevate even a beginner’s mapo tofu to levels that exceed most restaurant fare. Gao is interested, she said, in making the flavors of all China’s regional cuisines more accessible. But it is the chile crisp that remains at the heart of her business, perhaps because you can use it on anything. (On vanilla ice cream, for instance. Seriously.)
One of my favorite ways to use chile crisp is as a marinade and topping for tofu, with black vinegar, a little sesame oil, a wisp of honey, minced garlic and ginger, along with scallions and cilantro. It’s a sauce that calls up some of the flavors of Guizhou, where the cuisine relies on sourness as well as heat. The black vinegar adds a delicious pong. I bake the dressed tofu in a hot oven with green beans, to serve over rice. You could just as easily press the tofu awhile beneath paper towels, then coat it with egg and flour, fry it and serve the crunchy-soft cutlets beneath the sauce, with stir-fried green beans or steamed bok choy. The mixture elevates the protein marvelously, but it’s the chile crisp that matters, wherever you get it: a condiment to improve all it touches, a shortcut to deliciousness.
