In this blog I refer to this as soy sauce. This is regular soy sauce (jiang yu) and is light soy sauce to differentiate it from dark soy sauce, which has been aged longer and therefore also labeled aged soy…
Soy sauce, general
You’d think buying soy sauce is simple but this condiment can take up a whole aisle in an Asian supermarket. The choices are so wide I’ve seen many people stand…
Hoisin sauce
Hoisin Jeong in Cantonese, or haixian jiang in Mandarin, means seafood sauce. Hoi or hai means sea and sin or xian is fresh. The two Chinese characters combined, hoisin or…
Black bean sauce
Traditionally, we make black bean paste from scratch by soaking the dried, preserved black soy bean (dausi) and mashing it with garlic. Don’t be turned off by it’s strong…
Coconut milk
Traditionally we get our coconut milk by squeezing freshly grated coconut with sheer brute strength. We’d put the grated coconut in fine cloth, wrap around it and wring it dry.…
Zha cai, preserved Sichuan vegetable
Zha cai, from Sichuan, is a pickled round, bulbous stem. They look like roots, but are actually stems. Brined, it comes in different flavors, salty, or salty and spicy. Traditionally,…