Mekhala Organic East Asian Cooking Pastes 3.53oz (Szechuan Mala, 6)

Very authentic and very hot. A little bad will do ya. Having six small bottles instead of one big bottle means that it does not go rancid or off before you can finish a bottle. They also make good door gifts when visiting your friends who eat fire. Try it.

During this Covid-19 business, my favorite Chinese food restaurant hasn’t been accessible. I’m not sure if it was open but it’s a drive since we moved and a welcome treat occasionally. In the middle of the night the cravings would come. I looked up recipes without knowing what even goes into my favorite (spicy shredded chicken is a little non-specific and it’s a family place so probably a proprietary recipe).I found so many spicy recipes and the only thing I knew for sure was 2 am is the worst time to have a craving. Also, they all seemed to call for some form of chili paste.In Texas, look up chili paste at your local grocery store and you can make one heck of a five alarm chili, but unless you can go in and browse Amazon is the way to go.I put this and a few other things I remembered seeing in recipes in my cart and fired off an order. This is the one we tried first. (We have used beef every time so it wouldn’t go bad but I want to try this with chicken)It is nothing like my favorite! It is its own kind of good. It needed a squeeze of lemon and chili flakes so we did that on the second batch and it brightened it up a bit because it’s for sure a paste.Only complaint about this is that there are big peppercorns in it that don’t get soft. It wasn’t so obvious for the first batch. I bought another six pack of it because I wasn’t a fan of the other stuff I got.This paste has heat and tastes great! I am beyond excited to get back to my favorite food, but this is really helping.