Lao Gan Ma Spicy Chili Crisp
Many years ago, in a tiny village in Guizhou, China, there was a little girl named Tao. She was the eighth daughter of a poor family, so she often went hungry. One day she went out looking for food and found a patch of long, scraggly chili peppers. Peppers are special: they may not fill your belly, but the heat makes your hunger go away.
As she reached for the peppers a snarling dog came out of the underbrush. He was big and scary, but he was skinny—so skinny she could see his ribs. He must be hungry, she thought, but why does he want the peppers? Then she realized the dog wasn’t looking at the peppers. It was looking at her.
She met the dog’s gaze. He might be hungry, but she was hungrier.
She stomped and swung branches and snatched at the peppers. The dog snapped at her hand, circling and nipping, but she managed to run it off without getting hurt. She took the peppers home, cooked them together with some roots she had found, and ate it with her family. Another day without an empty plate.
This was her life for ten years. Every day she fought the dog, and most days she came home with something to eat.
Then she married. He was an accountant, but they still struggled. Not long after the birth of their second son, her husband fell very ill. Tao went to the countryside to find work. She could not read or write, but she had strong hands. She brought homemade chili sauce to put on her steamed buns at lunchtime. Her coworkers loved it.
Soon after, her husband died. As she slumped past the hospital, she saw the dog waiting, lurking in the shadows, still all teeth and ribs.
She returned to work, alone. This was her life for twenty years.
By this time, her chili sauce had gained a reputation. She opened a small shop, spent all day chopping peppers, and sold sauce to local restaurants. The dog lurked around her shop, watchful, but no longer snapping. A few years passed and she was able to start a factory. More chopping, more selling, more sauce. More years passed and she started another factory, and another.
Now, where she looks, the dog looks. Where she goes, the dog follows.
Her sons couldn’t see the dog. They took jobs at her factory, learned the business, and eventually she gave it over to them to manage. But they cut corners, changed distributors, traded quality for scale and efficiency. These things mean nothing to a hungry dog. So she took the company back, made things right.
This is her life today. Though she leans on a cane, her wizened face betrays no weakness. Her aged body contains three generations of struggle and taste. Her flagship hot sauce, Lao Gan Ma Chili Crisp, is a bridge across regimes, across cultures, across the gap between fabulous wealth and starvation.
There are struggles in America too, struggles that lie underneath our deep tradition of complex spice and slow cooking. But while heat has always made BBQ better, the sauces always had to have something to go on, even if it was just grits and government cheese. It has never been the entire meal.
And somewhere along the way, heritage rubs and molasses glazes yielded the commercial spotlight to a new kind of hot sauce: the pain circus. Though standbys like Tabasco and Cholula endure, they rub shoulders with a parade of new sadistic concoctions, snarkily-titled, adorned with cartoon faces contorted in panic, their contents laced with lab-distilled capsaicin. They are groundless tests of nerves and stomach linings, thin and heartless.
Lao Gan Ma is different. Lao Gan Ma is slower, thicker, warmer, more complicated. While other sauces promise intense sensations and deliver them immediately, Lao Gan Ma shows restraint: it could hurt you, but doesn’t. It hands you its knife at stomach level, handle out, its velvet wrap dripping with red oil. It didn't come to disembowel you. It is here to help you survive. It does not dominate the food it garnishes, but it could replace it if necessary. Lao Gan Ma is a meal in waiting in case all other food disappears. With rice and Lao Gan Ma, you can make a life, keep starvation at bay.
When you approach a case of Lao Gan Ma and see one hundred hard-faced women staring back, they are not looking at you. They are looking at the dog. Though we cannot see him, his teeth are still bared, his ribs still show, and it is only because of a little girl's hard-earned trust that he walks up to you, panting and hot, with a chili pepper in his mouth.
To taste Lao Gan Ma Chili Crisp is to place your hand in that mouth, feel that breath, graze your skin against sharp teeth, and withdraw a dripping spoonful to crush and devour.
Any hot sauce can tempt us with the exhilaration of survival, make us consider the possibility of our own death. But only in Lao Gan Ma do we taste, over and over, the bottomless longing of hunger itself. It is her oldest companion. And with every bottle sold—1.5 million times per day—she keeps her promise to never look away, never be first to blink.
