In This Article
A Chinese pantry looks enormous from the outside and is much smaller than it appears. Most home cooking in China runs on a dozen or so bottles and jars, and a great many dishes use the same six of them.
What follows is the order I'd buy them in, starting with what covers the most ground. Everything on this list keeps for months, and most of it keeps for years, so the cost per dish is close to nothing.
The First Four
Light soy sauce, dark soy sauce, Chinkiang vinegar, Shaoxing wine. If you buy nothing else, buy these.
Light soy is for salt and savoriness, and it's what you cook with. Dark soy is thicker, less salty, and mostly for color — it's what turns a braise the color of mahogany. They are not interchangeable; using light soy where dark is called for gives you a dish that tastes right and looks wrong.
Chinkiang vinegar is malty and dark, closer to a balsamic than to a rice wine vinegar, and it's the backbone of the sweet-sour sauces. Shaoxing wine is for meat marinades and for deglazing. Dry sherry is an acceptable substitute for the wine; there is no good substitute for the vinegar, though rice vinegar plus a small splash of balsamic gets close.
The Fermented Pastes
Pixian doubanjiang — fermented broad bean and chile paste — is the single most important ingredient in Sichuan cooking. It's salty, funky, and deep red, and it goes into mapo tofu, yu xiang pork, twice-cooked pork, and most of what you'd recognize as Sichuan food. Look for jars labeled Pixian; generic chile bean sauce is a different, flatter product.
Fermented black beans (douchi) are whole soybeans preserved in salt, and a spoonful adds a savory depth that soy sauce can't. Rinse them lightly before using if the dish is already salty.
Oyster sauce is Cantonese in origin and used nationally now. It adds body and a faint sweetness, and it's the glue in a lot of quick stir-fry sauces. Vegetarian versions made from mushrooms are genuinely good.
The Dry Shelf
Dried red chiles. Two kinds are worth having: facing-heaven chiles for Sichuan food, which are short and intensely aromatic, and something like arbol for general use. Store them in the freezer and they'll keep their color and heat for a year instead of fading in three months.
Sichuan peppercorns, both red and green. Not a pepper, not related to black pepper — it's the husk of a prickly ash seed, and it produces the numbing sensation called ma. Buy whole, toast dry, grind as needed. Pre-ground is a completely different and much duller thing.
Dried wood ear mushrooms, dried shiitake, and potato starch. The mushrooms rehydrate in twenty minutes and last essentially forever. Potato starch, not cornstarch, is what Chinese kitchens use for velveting and for slurry — it gives a glossier, more stable sauce.
What You Don't Need Yet
Skip the specialist vinegars, the hundred-spice blends, the dried seafood, and the various medicinal ingredients. They belong to specific dishes, and you'll know when you need them.
Skip MSG-free labels too. MSG is a standard seasoning in Chinese home kitchens and a pinch of it does what salt can't. If you'd rather not use it, that's a legitimate choice, but don't buy products reformulated to exclude it and expect the same result.
And buy the small bottle of anything you're trying for the first time. Several of these ingredients are polarizing — particularly the fermented ones — and a large jar of something you won't use is worse than no jar.
