ChineseCookingDemystified
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Sichuan Chili Oil: The Complete Guide
🕑 Added 2025-06-03 10:19:54 +0000 UTCAs a home cook, I’ve always hated what I call ‘nested’ recipes.
You know the sort —open up some cookbooks, and it’s like a damn matryoshka doll: recipes needing a spice blend given at page 6, a prepped sauce from page 35, which in turn uses a stock from page 12.
Of course, there’s a reason these cookbooks are doing what they do — pre-prepared, batch-prepped ingredients can obviously be useful. If you’re making Thai food on the regular, having an excellent homemade curry paste in your fridge is certainly going to be a useful trick up your sleeve. But the reality of many modern food lovers is that a lot of us find ourselves making a Chowder on Thursday, a Massaman Curry on Friday, Sichuan Boiled fish on Saturday, and a Ragu on Sunday. Multi-culturalism… has spoiled us.
Now, our recipes tend to aim for cultural fidelity, so admittedly not many could be described as ‘quick and easy’ or ‘dinner in 20 minutes’. But nested recipes? That’s where I’ve chosen to draw the line.
And frankly, maybe that’s sometimes made covering certain Sichuan dishes a little awkward... because Sichuan food (especially restaurant food) you certainly do need a hefty bit of... chili oil.
So. This revisitation of the Sichuan restaurant chili oil universe will also be complete with a (hopefully exhaustive) written post on how use these chili oils up, as — with the exception of Hongyou — we will likely not be calling for them in any future recipes (I do, after all, still hate nested recipes). Currently, we have 2-3 recipes per chili oil ready, and we will be updating the written post over time with additional recipes :)
Comments
Matthew Kagan
For turnabout, I can answer a question of yours! Aleppo is in Northern Syria. Tragically, the the city and region was the site of horrible violence during the civil war. As a result, virtually all chiles labelled "Aleppo" today are grown in Turkey. Hopefully, Syria can rebuild and maybe soon, we'll have the opportunity to support a reborn industry by purchasing chiles grown in Aleppo.
Stephanie Li and Chris Thomas
From my understanding, there's also "volatile oil of mustard", which isn't used as a cooking oil. Perhaps you grabbed this one? Unfortunately, I can only speak to my own experience, as we definitely aren't experts in Indian cuisine!
Nathaniel Huang
Great video. One question, are there different types of Indian mustard oil? I tried one of your previous recipes using mustard oil as a caiziyou substitute when making the chilli oil but found the mustard flavour overpowered the final result as to make it almost inedible. I’m wondering if I used the wrong type of oil?
