Spice Report From Our Month in Sichuan
Hello, Friends of The Mala Market!
It's been quite a month (or two) since our last update. So where to start?
Well, first of all by thanking you for your patience while we traveled to Sichuan for the month of June. When we left, we had no way of knowing that we would be featured in a story on Bon Appetit called "These 10 Great Online Specialty Food Stores Have Everything." We were super grateful for the exposure, but it was a dilemma, since we weren't at home to accept and ship the orders. And we also sold out of several products. We are eternally grateful to those of you who ordered anyway and waited several weeks for your order to ship. That's some serious commitment to Sichuan food and quality ingredients!
Everything is now back in stock, and there are a couple new items as well (see below), as well as others on the way in the coming months.
In the end we think it was worth it, because not only did we come back from Chengdu and Chongqing with a million recipe ideas for The Mala Project, but we also learned even more about Sichuan products, how they are grown and produced, and how to source the very best. After a decade of travel to Sichuan, I finally made it to the Sichuan pepper farms in their ancestral home of Hanyuan County, and followed the trail of the little numbing spice from there to processors and spice markets to better understand every step of where our Sichuan pepper comes from.
We've included some highlights of our trip below and hope to share many more in the coming months, both here and on the blog, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.
As always, thank you for reading and shopping! Taylor & Fong Chong
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