The Chili Oil Flavor Profile

Chili oils made with hot oil and ground chilies have been a staple of Sichuan cuisine for well over a century. In Sichuan, chili oil is known by a few names, including the name that lends itself to this official complex flavor: hóngyóu (红油), literally "red oil" flavor. 

Chili peppers arrived in Sichuan around the 16th and 17th centuries, though it is hard to pin down exactly when chili oil itself became a kitchen staple. It was certainly well-established by the start of the 20th century. In Fu Chongju’s book A Comprehensive Chronicle of Chengdu (Chéngdū Tōngjiàn, 成都通鉴), published around 1910, chili oil is listed alongside soy sauce and vinegar as an essential Chengdu pantry item (referred to in the text as “hot oil chili pepper” rèyóu hǎijiāo, 热油海椒). Today, chili oil is a staple across the province, drizzled over cold appetizers, noodles, dumplings, wontons and street snacks. 

As the name suggests, hóngyóu wèi (红油味) is built around chili oil, but the flavor profile isn’t just about this one ingredient; in pretty much all hongyou wei dishes, the heat and toasted flavors are also balanced by a combination of soy sauce, sugar and salt. This mixture of ingredients is most commonly used as a dressing for liángcài (凉菜), the cold or room-temperature appetizers that kick off a meal. 

Hongyou wei is described as “spicy, fragrant, salty, umami, with a sweet aftertaste” (咸鲜辣香, 回味略甜) and is built from a few classic Sichuan ingredients:

Core ingredients: chili oil, soy sauce, sugar, salt

Frequent ingredients: black vinegar, sesame oil, stock, msg

The base ingredients, along with any added flavorings, are whisked into a smooth dressing that is a glossy red, highly fragrant and only moderately spicy. For chicken dishes, a splash of cold stock is sometimes also added to the sauce to thin it out so that it coats all the elements of the dish evenly. 

Learn more about hongyou wei and how to create it on its new index page, which includes tips for using it with both cold and warm dishes, along with full recipes featuring this complex flavor. Hongyou chaoshou, better known in the U.S. as wontons in chili oil, is a good place to start for hot dishes. 
 

Hongyou Wei: Tofu and Vegetable Salad

Click on the video above to see how easy it is to make hongyou flavor!

An extremely versatile recipe exemplifying hongyou wei is this Three-Sliver Vegetable and Tofu Salad With Chili Oil Dressing.

If you've ever had a tofu salad made from pressed tofu "noodles," then you know how delicious and satisfyingly chewy it is as a cold-dish ingredient, the perfect contrast to crunchy vegetable slivers. But tofu sheets are not required for this dish in the bigger picture, where that ingredient can be replaced by any number of other ingredients to make a "three-sliver salad," or sansi dish. 

Here our fuhe wei expert, Xueci Cheng, introduces us to the wonderful world of sansi salads:

"...Hongyou wei is perhaps the most common way to dress cold dishes—and it’s certainly the most eye-catching. Walk into almost any Sichuan restaurant, and you are likely to find classics such as red-oil pork ears (hóngyóu ěrpiàn, 红油耳片) and red-oil chicken (hóngyóu jīkuài, 红油鸡块) or just a selection of vegetables and tofu tossed in this vibrant dressing. Some restaurants are so generous with the sauce that the ingredients seem almost to float in a shimmering pool of red oil. 

"While hongyou dishes can be built around a single main ingredient, such as shredded bamboo shoots or pressed tofu, Sichuan chefs also love combining three contrasting ingredients into a single dish known as san si (三丝), or three slivers. The interplay of different colors, textures and flavors makes these cold dishes fun to eat....

"Hóngyóu sānsī (红油三丝) traditionally includes shredded chicken or pork intestines, as well as crunchy vegetables like bamboo shoots, carrots, radish and/or celtuce. Beyond these classic choices, there’s plenty of room for creativity. Cucumber, kohlrabi, bell peppers and celery all work beautifully, and I often see sansi made with mung bean glass noodles, shredded kelp, wood ear mushrooms and/or pressed or seasoned tofu.

"My recipe here is essentially a vegetable and tofu salad. It includes cucumber, carrot and pressed tofu sheets (known as bǎiyè dǒufu, 百叶豆腐), which are easy to find in Berlin where I live and offer a nice mix of colors and textures. That said, the instructions below are really just a formula; it is highly adaptable to whatever ingredients you have on hand. The key is just to cut all the ingredients into uniformly thin slivers. Not only does this create an elegant presentation but it also ensures that the different ingredients mix evenly and quickly absorb the dressing."

Sichuan Cold Noodles

The OG of spicy cold noodles is Sichuan's liang mian. This recipe is for classic liang mian, or cold wheat noodles, which is built on the hongyou flavor profile, with chili oil as the defining taste. It is a simple dish but nonetheless benefits from some tried-and-true Sichuan techniques for the most pleasing texture and taste.

While this recipe includes some garlic and Sichuan pepper, they blend seamlessly with the other ingredients without taking over, which is pretty much the definition of the hongyou flavor. If you add a considerable amount of garlic to the sauce, it might tip over into the suan ni, or mashed garlic, flavor; and if you go heavy on the ground Sichuan pepper, it would, of course, be considered mala wei, hot-and-numbing flavor.

One other variation on the sauce for cold noodles includes Chinese roasted sesame paste. While not the norm in Sichuan liang mian, sesame paste creates a whole other wonderful flavor in the guai wei, or "strange flavor" fuhe wei. See my take on strange flavor sesame noodles here, and Ruth Reichl's recent recipe for cold sesame noodles here—where she recommends you take along Mala Market sesame paste and alkaline wheat noodles in your summer suitcase so you can make it on vacation!
 

100,000th Order! 

We're not big on self-promotion, but we can't let our 100,000th order come and go without a small celebration and pat on the back—and a big thank you to you, our customers! (We think it's quite fitting that order 100,000 was placed by a customer in Culpepper, VA. We looked it up, and Culpepper is an old English surname meaning "pepper gatherer"!)

Fongchong and I still run our very lean company as the only full-time employees, along with indispensable help from our fulfillment associate, Mary Shen, our blog editor, Georgia Freedman, and numerous writers and contractors (but no bots). As warehouse and fulfillment manager, Fongchong has touched almost every one of those 100,000 orders with unflagging care and commitment, making sure you received them in perfect condition more than 99% of the time. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who keep ordering. Together, let's shoot for 200,000!