The driving force behind crunchy chilli sensation Lao GAN Ma | Hacker News Reader

The driving force behind crunchy chilli sensation Lao GAN Ma

theguardian.com

18 pointsrongopo11 comments

This is amazing. I’ve been buying this for nearly a decade and refer to it as the angry lady hot sauce.

I used to enjoy perusing the “hot sauce aisle” in my local Great Wall Asian supermarket and this jar looked great. The jar said “spicy chili crisp”, which I also joke are the 3 most wonderful words in the English language. I also liked that it looked like the lady was angry (I chalked it up to cultural differences in marketing):

> “Lao Gan Ma deliberately places an extraordinary average-looking and old Chinese female on its product package, which conversely arouses strong curiosities of foreign consumers,” it says.

It’s a staple in my kitchen (along with Lee Kim Kee’s Chiu Chow Chili Oil and Momofuku’s chili oil) and happy that they’ve seen the success they have.

I just realized if they wanted to be cute here, Lao Gan Ma sounds kind of like “Love, Grandma” :-)

I ran into a Heinz imitation of this at my local supermarket and it wasn't particularly spicy (as could be predicted.) How spicy is the real stuff? https://www.heinz.com/product/00013000001267/heinz-57-collec...

Not sure but none of these are terribly spicy. They’re actually quite flavorful.

They add a (slightly spicy) nice warm blanket of flavor to a bunch of things while enhancing the original flavor of the dish (which is likely what the msg is doing)

Jesus that packaging and name is bland. If you swapped the nationalities of the respective companies, people would be screaming "cheap knockoff".

I love your take on her being angry. I've always called the look disappointed auntie. Like "you forgot to take your shoes off. Go back and do that before you talk to me" levels of disappointment is all.

This reads like pure PR, still I could not find a viable recipe. Any ideas how to prepare it?

Lol is everyone these days jaded? It's a fluff piece, it's not a PR announcement, lots of people are nostalgic or happy to see something lighter fare occasionally, not everything has to be "the world is burning".

I treat it like a regular condiment. I will make a stir-fry, serve it, and mix some in on my plate. So like adding ketchup to my hamburger (I add it to hamburgers too).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FpgawC2FKp4

Very impressive video, I always wondered how these diagonal onions were cut in the TianTian restaurant that I frequented in Beijing.

I add a little soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil to it, and dip dumplings in it.

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