Chili Sauce Nom Nom Nom

The biggest table-side condiment for authentic Chinese food isn't soy sauce--it's hot sauce. In most restaurants in China you'll find a little jar on chili sauce on the table, and sometimes it'll be the only condiment. Real Chinese hot sauce run the gamut, from heavily salty to savory to sour-spicy to spicy-numb (mala). The important thing is, it's hella popular and a good hot sauce will add an extra oomph as well as layers of flavors to your food.

"Laoganma" Brand hot sauce makes some of the best Chinese hot sauces on the market. The name translates roughly to "Old Godmother" or "Old Foster Mother"--NOT "Old Dry Mother". My family uses it and they say it's head above the rest. They have something like 80% of the chili sauce market share in China, and they've spawned tons of similarly-named imitators and counterfeits in the motherland. When I was teaching in Shenzhen, I had a tiny bottle of Laoganma black bean sauce as my only condiment, and I would eat it with ALL the food I'd have in my dorm, from dumplings to baozi to shaomai to ramen to canned tuna. It goes great with everything, and it's like extra flavor in a jar.


You can easily get Laoganma in any Chinese grocery. They make a wide range of sauces (their black bean sauce is AWESOME). My local Ranch 99 only has their savory "Hot and Spicy Sauce" and "Chili Sauce in Oil" though. It's the only brand with a photograph of a dowdy old peasant woman--you can't miss it--and there WILL be English on the jar.

The dowdy peasant woman is actually their founder and CEO, who rose up from being an illiterate widow running a noodle stand to owning her own multimillion-dollar business on the basis of a spectacular chili sauce recipe.

Anyway, commercial hot sauce aside, the BEST Chinese hot sauce in the world is made by my mom. That's not opinion, it's a fact. It's savory and spicy and a little salty and mala (numb-spicy). Before we finished it, we ate it with everything from egg-and-sausage breakfast bagelwiches to forbidden rice.

My mom makes her black bean chili sauce completely from scratch, which she says is really complicated and requires good timing. The cooking process also fills the house with chili pepper smoke and has a Mace-like effect on all occupants and pets.

So my mom gave me her "abridged" version instead, in the spirit of Sandra Lee. I've made it a few times and it's delicious if not quite the real thing. You can get all the ingredients at the local Asian market. Try it with stir-fry, dumplings, fried rice or chow mein, or experiment by adding it to western food like fried eggs. Give it a try!

My Mom's Chinese Black Bean Chili Sauce (for Dummies)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup dry peanuts (uncooked)
1/2 cup black beans (the salty Chinese kind, called "Douchi", or "Doushi"... NOT the Mexican food kind!)
3 T "Laoganma" brand Hot and Spicy Sauce
1 T Szichuan peppercorns
1 clove minced garlic
1/2 chopped green onion
1/2 T chopped ginger
1 dash soy sauce
1 dash chili oil (optional)
A LOT of cooking oil

1. Chop the peanuts until they're halved and quartered (we pulse them in our Magic Bullet, briefly)

2. Fry the peanuts and szichuan peppercorns in a 1/2 - 1 cm of oil. Fry until peanuts are crispy.

3. Add the garlic, ginger, and green onion.

4. Add the black beans. The key is to have them cooked enough by the end that their flavor is released into the sauce, but not so much until they are hard and crispy.

5. Add the Laoganma spicy sauce.

6. Add the soy sauce to taste (make sure it's a little on the salty sice, since it IS a flavor-blasting condiment). If you think it needs more oil, or it just needs to be spicier, add a dash of the chili oil. When the finished sauce is jarred, it should be covered in oil.

7. Jar it, and let it sit and seap overnight.

Enjoy!

Nom Nom Nom #1

Hi!  Welcome to my new food blog.  I'm totally obsessed with food and always experimenting, so I've decided to start a blog to share my recipes and the awesome places I've discovered to eat.  

I like foods that are exciting and flavors that are adventurous, and I always like to try something new.  I also have a soft spot for Asian cuisine, but that's what I was raised on.  

Since I'm always experimenting, things don't come out 100% 100% of the time, but I'll only post how-tos up when I've perfected the recipe, and I'll try to post pictures whenever I can.  

Happy Eating!!

Monica