“I’m not saying this is what Sichuan food is,” she says. Gao stresses her product is about her own expression of Chinese flavor.

But people compare them because there aren’t many on sale here. The only similarity between her sauce and Lao Gan Ma is that they’re both oil-based chili sauces. She says that is like comparing Cholula to Frank’s RedHot because they are both vinegar-based hot sauces. At the same time, she saw how Westerners looked at Chinese food-why they expected everything to be cheap and made from low-budget filler ingredients-and the systemic biases that prevented the conversation around this cuisine from being about quality, rather than price.Īs she dives headlong into a wider audience, that growth means overcoming questions of authenticity and deflecting the inevitable comparison to Lao Gan Ma, the beloved and well-established brand of chili crisp and Chinese-style hot sauce. As she took her pop-up dinners from Shanghai to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and the U.S., Gao says she saw the reactions people had to ingredients and dishes they hadn’t tasted before-at least in part because so much of the cuisine never even made it out of China. Gao founded an award-winning fast-casual restaurant in Shanghai, then moved on to cooking the foods she remembered in her private kitchen restaurant. “There’s so much depth and complexity to Chinese food, and nobody knew about it,” she says. A pinch of sweetness and a whole lot of grounding flavor makes this mix the perfect add-it-to-everything jar of goodness. After one bite of these succulent dumplings, you’ll never view frozen food the same again. It features 11 intense and harmonious spices (including those two Sichuan must-haves Tribute and Erjingtiao), along with notes of cumin and mushroom that offer a complex flavor profile that’ll keep you on your toes.

The sauce’s creation also stemmed from her own realization that she’d drifted away from the cooking of her native Chengdu.Īfter growing up all over the world, Gao returned to Asia as an adult, working for Procter & Gamble, and realized she wasn’t the only one missing out on those specific flavors. Oh, and while you’re at it, you may as well pick up a few of their best-selling chili sauces too. “I wish I could sit down and tell each customer the backstory.” Gao created the sauce to help people taste Sichuan cuisine in a way they might not have before, to get them talking about the flavors and quality they might not have associated with it previously. “I want to have a dialogue,” she says, to share the flavors she loves, to exchange and engage with people about them. Customers are intrigued, and to Gao, that’s part of the point. The flavor was good and you can use it for so many different recipes. A yellow-flowering member of the mustard family, semi-winter rapeseed is sown before winter, flowers in spring, and tends to carry flavor rather than impart it, making it a choice vessel for Fly by Jing's complex condiments.

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