Sichuan Mala Sauce for Stir-Fry and Dry Pot (Gluten-Free)

Do you know Sichuan dry pot? Called ganguo (干锅) or mala xiangguo (麻辣香锅) in China, it's a wildly popular dish there that is basically hot pot without the broth, meaning it has the same flavors as Sichuan mala hot pot but is made more like a stir-fry. 

The beauty of dry pot is that you can make it from basically anything you want or have on hand; it's hard to mess up because it requires no serious wok skills; and it tastes like Sichuan itself—all that meat and veg and seafood and tofu bathed in a hot-and-numbing mala sauce.

Like hot pot, you can make the sauce for dry pot from scratch but it will require almost every ingredient in your Sichuan pantry and then some, which is why most people even in Sichuan use a readymade sauce as the base for dry pot. 

However, the most popular dry pot sauce on the market has nine(!) additives and preservatives on its ingredient list. That is typical of readymade cooking sauces, which is why it took us awhile to find a dry pot sauce that has the authentic taste of Sichuan and Chongqing and is delicious enough to eat over and over, but has no strange additives or preservatives. (It does have a smidge of msg, but msg has been fully exonerated—and its inclusion here allows the use of less salt to attain the same savory flavor.)

This is also not your American supermarket stir-fry sauce, where the main ingredient is sugar. The base of this sauce is Pixian chili bean paste (doubanjiang) and roasted rapeseed oil (caiziyou). It also includes pickled erjingtiao chilies and Sichuan fermented soybeans (douchi), along with a slew of aromatics and spices. 

What it does not include is any wheat, so unlike the great majority of fermented Chinese sauces, it is gluten-free! (We have double-tested it for gluten.) 

The Mala Market's Sichuan Mala Sauce for Stir-Fry and Dry Pot is made for us and to our specifications in Chongqing. It tastes like eating dry pot in Chongqing, so expect a bit of numbing and quite a lot of chili heat. If you prefer less heat, simply use less sauce than directed, though do remember that a real mala sauce is meant to be spicy!

How to Cook With Dry Pot Sauce

You can think of dry pot as a large stir-fry. However, because it has multiple ingredients of your choosing, most of the ingredients are pre-cooked. Making a superior stir-fry at home also often entails pre-cooking some ingredients, but in the case of a dry pot you are not cooking the ingredients in the sauce, you are simply combining cooked ingredients with the sauce as the final step. This method also allows you to make a larger stir-fry than one can normally make in a wok; while you will probably limit a stir-fry to 1 or 1.5 pounds of ingredients, you can easily make a 3-pound dry pot in a 14-inch wok. 

So pick your proteins (chicken wings, chicken thighs, pork belly, pork riblets, Chinese sausage, shrimp, fish balls, etc.) and pre-cook by stir-frying or deep-frying one at a time. Then pick your vegetables (yu choy, broccoli, cauliflower, lotus root, celtuce, green bean, potato, mushroom, wood ear,  etc.) and blanch them in boiling water until almost done. Some ingredients, like dried or fried tofu or tofu skin, may only need a soak or no prep. 

Finally, stir-fry some aromatics (garlic, ginger, green onion) and, optionally, additional spices (dried chilies, whole Sichuan pepper, cumin seed) in a generous amount of oil. Add the sauce, then add back all the ingredients and cook briefly in the sauce. Garnish with sesame seeds and serve with rice. 

This jar is enough to generously sauce 6 pounds of ingredients, making anywhere from 2 to 4 dry pots, depending on how many people you are feeding and how spicy they like it. Or, it will make up to 6 simple, quick stir-fries of a couple ingredients. 

See our recipes for more ideas and instructions: Mala Dry Pot With Shrimp, Tofu and Pork Belly (Ganguo 干锅/Mala Xiangguo 麻辣香锅) or Sichuan Dry Pot With Chicken Wings and Shrimp (Ganguo Jichi Xia 干锅鸡翅虾).

Producer: Made for The Mala Market in Chongqing
Size: 11.3 ounces (320 grams)
Ingredients: roasted rapeseed oil, Pixian bean paste (broad bean, salt, chili), pickled er jing tiao chili, salt, ginger, garlic, chili, sugar, msg, fermented soybean, sesame, Sichuan pepper, spices
Contains: soybean, sesame

Refrigerate once opened. 

Non-GMO, Vegan, Gluten-Free (double-tested for gluten), Preservative-Free