“I can still recall taking my first bite at the age of five in a fly restaurant near my grandparent’s home,” she writes. A famous street snack in Chengdu, Zhong Dumplings have always been a favorite of Jing’s. This week, Jing is sharing one of her special recipes with us on The Journal: Zhong Dumplings. The sauces-a Sichuan Chili Crisp (that’s always sold-out), Zhong Sauce, and Mala Spice Mix-offer a worldly convergence of flavors and feelings, heat and texture, stories and culture that transport you. Most recently, Jing unveiled Fly By Jing, her collection of pantry staples that honor the flavors of her native Sichuan Province. For more than a decade, the laudable cook and writer has been exploring the food of her native country through her various creative endeavors, which include an award-winning restaurant in Shanghai, world-wide pop-up dinners, and writing and TV contributions for global outlets. 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.Jing Gao expands the possibilities of Chinese cuisine-and the minds of those who may try to either define it or shy away from it. 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. I bake the dressed tofu in a hot oven with green beans, to serve over rice. It’s a sauce that calls up some of the flavors of Guizhou, where the cuisine relies on sourness as well as heat. 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. But it is the chile crisp that remains at the heart of her business, perhaps because you can use it on anything. Gao is interested, she said, in making the flavors of all China’s regional cuisines more accessible. 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. Some 2,500 people, she says, signed up to get one of the first jars. “But our hypothesis was that people would pay a higher price for better value, better ingredients, better taste.” “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. “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. She has since lived in Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai and lately Los Angeles, but considers herself Canadian above all. 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. Jenny Gao, born Jing Gao, started Fly by Jing a couple of years ago on Kickstarter. 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. 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. 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. Bowls of warm white rice followed, adorned with pats of butter and drizzles of soy sauce: savory sweetness once more. Then they ate them and were amazed at the sweet, salty, fiery-crisp softness of the combination. Īt the start of the pandemic season, when isolation was new, my family scoffed at my peanut butter sandwiches slathered with sriracha, shingled with pickles. To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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