A Chinese Pantry Things you'll need to make Chinese food taste right.

If you’re a 鬼佬¹ like me and you’ve tried to make Chinese food at home using recipes you’ve found online, you’ve probably been pretty disappointed with the results. Nothing tastes quite right. Sauces taste too much like ketchup or BBQ sauce. Whole flavor components are missing.

The first thing you probably want to do is stop using recipes from major Western recipe sites. If you’re stuck with English, your best bet is going to be blogs from East Asian transplants to Western countries. People blogging their mother’s recipes from their childhood.

The second thing you should do is take a trip to your local Chinese grocery and stock up on a small handful of things to provide the flavors that are missing from the usual Western pantry. Here are some of the things we bought recently, and that we’ll use in some of the East Asian dishes that we will blog about.

Fermented Bean Paste

Fermented bean paste (dòubànjiàng, 豆瓣酱) provides the funky fermented flavor you get in a lot of Sichuan food in particular. It comes both plain and hot (là, 辣). If you’ve got any tolerance for heat, go for the là version, but it can be handy to have both.

This is a flavor that you can’t really approximate with anything else in the pantry that I know of. If you like Sichuan food, it’s a necessity. It provides the backbone of dishes like mapo tofu.

Sichuan Peppercorn

Sichuan peppercorn (huājiāo, 花椒), which you may also see as “prickly ash”, is another crucial ingredient because of its unique flavor and properties. The Sichuan peppercorn has a very different piquancy than other things we call “hot”, things like chilis, western peppercorns, mustard, or horseradish. It causes a unique numbing sensation, and lends an herbal flavor and aroma reminiscent of citrus and juniper.

The peppercorn is added directly to a lot of dishes, often whole rather than ground, and is also a great addition to chili oil.

Sichuan peppercorns were illegal in the US until quite recently, since they can carry a disease that threatens domestic citrus production. Import restrictions have been relaxed now, but they can still be pretty difficult to find. If unavailable locally, you can find them online from purveyors like Penzey’s.

Shaoxing Wine

Shaoxing wine (shàoxīngjiǔ, 绍兴酒) is a dark rice wine. A lot of Chinese dishes will call for this, but if you’re making a dish that doesn’t use very much, it’s safe to substitute something like a dry cooking sherry. The nuance of it is pretty important for dishes that use it heavily though, namely drunken chicken (zuìjī, 醉鸡). Even though this one is pretty easy to sub out in most dishes, it’s worth picking up a bottle because of how cheap it is. Our 750ml bottle only cost $2.50 from our local Asian grocery.

Dark Soy Sauce

Dark soy sauce (lǎochōu, 老抽) is pretty similar to the usual light soy sauce that you can buy in Western grocery stores, but you wouldn’t want to sub it out 1-for-1 in a recipe. Dark soy sauce is sweeter, thicker, and most importantly less salty. It also adds a deeper color to marinades and sauces.

You’ll want regular soy sauce too (shēngchōu, 生抽), but you probably already have that, or something similar enough. That bottle of Kikkoman Soy Sauce that you probably have in the refrigerator will get the job done.

Dried Shiitake Mushrooms

While we think of shiitake mushrooms as Japanese due to the name, they’re also very common in Chinese cuisine, where they’re called xiāng gū (香菇) or dōng gū (冬菇). You can find dried whole shiitakes in Asian groceries a lot cheaper than at most Western groceries. Stock up. Rehydrate them in water before using, and they lend an essential earthiness to soups and porridge. The thick, chewy texture of rehydrated shiitakes is also something special.

Chilis

Getting the right kind of dried chilis can make a subtle but noticeable difference. If you’re already stopping into a Chinese grocery, try to pick up a bag of dried chilis there. They’ll cost almost nothing. You can also pick them up online from places like Penzey’s.

Chili Oil

We like to make our own chili oil (recipe coming soon). But you can also buy it, if you’re lazy. This can even be found at most Western groceries from brands like House of Tsang. Chili oil is important as a finishing oil. A bit of it sprinkled over the top of a noodle soup will help coat the noodles with a pleasant heat and aroma.

Sesame Oil

Sesame oil is available just about anywhere, so you won’t need to make a special trip for it. The flavor and scent is one of the most amazing things in food in general, and there is absolutely no substitute for it.

Hoisin Sauce

Also available in just about any grocery store, Hoisin sauce (hǎixiānjiàng, 海鲜酱) is a toasted soy-based product that lends a distinctive flavor to stir fries and marinades. It’s a key flavor in things like char siu pork. Interestingly, hoisin sauce literally translates as “seafood sauce” even though it contains no seafood.

Fish Sauce

Fish sauce scares a lot of people. Myself included. It smells horrifying, and is basically made of rotten fish. But it adds a delicate fermented flavor that’s essential to a lot of southeast asian foods. Have faith. It wouldn’t be such a popular ingredient if it tasted as bad as it smells out of the bottle.

… and more.

Obviously this isn’t a comprehensive list, but it will get you pretty far. If you start to get into Malaysian food or regional Chinese cuisines, you’re going to pretty quickly run into a lot of things that you don’t have. This is a good start though, and will get you ready to make a lot of really tasty stuff.