from Hacker News

The driving force behind crunchy chilli sensation Lao GAN Ma

by rongopo on 11/5/22, 12:21 PM with 11 comments

  • by atonse on 11/5/22, 12:55 PM

    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” :-)

  • by rongopo on 11/5/22, 12:22 PM

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