Our first shipment of this new book is signed by the author!
Chinese-food authority Fuchsia Dunlop's new cookbook, Five Tastes, focusses on the building-block flavors that underscore all of Chinese cooking. The number one building block in Chinese food is soy sauce, so we have combined Five Tastes with Sichuan's heritage brand, handcrafted soy sauce for this gift set. Our premium, small-batch Zhongba soy sauce is discounted 15% when purchased with the book.
As Fuchsia explains in the book’s introduction, most Chinese recipes are defined by one of the country’s classic flavor combinations—like Sichuan’s mala, red-oil and "homestyle" flavor profiles. But in this book she goes beyond expected and traditional dishes and also uses these flavors and ingredients in expansive and adventurous ways.
The book asks you to think about a Chinese pantry by identifying a product's taste and the flavor profiles you can create with it. The salty and umami category of seasonings includes the most important Chinese ingredient, soy sauce, which plays a role in many of China's most popular complex flavors. For example, sweet-and-sour; red-oil; spicy-and-savory; "fish-fragrant," etc.
While there is a lot of Sichuan influence in the book's recipes, they are by no means all spicy, and the flavor profiles range across the whole of China. "The minimum requirement for cooking Chinese food" Fuchsia writes, "is one bottle of light or traditional soy sauce. If you will be doing a lot of Chinese cooking, I recommend keeping in stock a big bottle of light soy sauce, a small bottle of dark soy sauce, and one premium soy sauce for dips and cold dishes."
The Zhongba Handcrafted Soy Sauce in this collection is just such a premium soy sauce, but it's also in a quite large and impressive bottle that allows you to use it in any dish that deserves a complex, rich, umami flavor.
What's Included
Five Tastes: Delicious Recipes for Chinese Flavors, 367 pages
This cookbook gathers Fuchsia Dunlop's more improvisational recipes, inspired by Chinese flavors. The introductory chapters of Five Tastes are not to be skipped, as it is there that the author introduces classic Chinese flavor combinations and points you toward the recipes, both traditional and nontraditional, that use each one.
A few examples: fried eggs with fish-fragrant sauce; sour-and-hot roasted chicken broth; sweet-sour scorched eggplant salad; green onion oil and porcini noodles. She takes Sichuan's classic "homestyle" flavor, which is built on Sichuan doubanjiang and fermented soybeans (think mapo tofu), and applies it to dishes you're unlikely to find in China, namely mussels and oven-roasted chicken legs. Similarly, she adds fermented tofu (furu) to a French vinaigrette to spoon over steamed leeks, and whips up a sesame-paste-forward "strange-flavor" sauce for Chinese crudités. She also shows off her love of the combo of green Sichuan pepper and lime, a citrus rarely used in China, for both savory and sweet dishes.
The book includes a very thorough explanation of pantry ingredients, where Fuchsia notes that "more companies are starting to focus on quality Chinese products; it is worth seeking these out if you can." We agree!
Zhongba Handcrafted Soy Sauce, 24 oz
This impressively large bottle of soy sauce is naturally brewed for one full year, far longer than most commercial soy sauces. It is completely handmade following a centuries-old process that includes stirring it daily by hand as it ages.
Handcrafted Zhongba soy sauce is naturally brewed in clay crocks from non-GMO soybeans, wheat, salt and water. The crocks are left uncovered during the day, exposing the sauce to sunlight, seasonal temperature changes and the native microbial environment of Sichuan. These conditions shape the final flavor, contributing subtle variation and depth—an effect similar to terroir in wine.
As a finishing touch, a prized wild mushroom from northern China is infused in the sauce, contributing its natural glutamic acid (though not a pronounced mushroom flavor). The result is a deep-red soy sauce with full body and mouthfeel, a compellingly rich aroma, and a complex flavor that is so much more than salty. We invite you to do a taste test with this soy sauce and any other you can find to understand the difference a long, natural brewing process and 200 years of experience make.
Allergens
Zhongba soy sauce includes soybean and wheat. It is all natural, with no additives or preservatives.
See its product page for a complete listing of ingredients and nutrition facts.
