Walk into any restaurant in the country these days, and there’s a good chance you’ll find a bottle of chilli oil sitting on the table, ready for you to dip or sprinkle or pour at your leisure. Although chilli oil first arrived on these shores courtesy of Chinese cuisine, it’s become a universally loved condiment, and as a nation, we’ll eat it with absolutely anything.
Not all chilli oils are created equal, though. Your average chilli oil tends to be a simple combination of chilli and oil, with the oil heated up, then poured over dried chilli and left to steep – resulting in that classic scarlet hue – and the dried chilli usually discarded. That’s all well and good if you’re after an extra hit of heat and colour, but if you want something that has a real depth of flavour and plenty of punch, there’s one oil that rises above the rest.
Chiu Chow chilli oil originated in southern China, specifically Chiu Chow (also known as Chaozhou) – a city in east Guangdong. The local cuisine is influenced by both Cantonese food (which is all about getting as much umami flavour out of ingredients as possible and what almost all Chinese food in the UK is based around) and the food of Fujian. Chiu Chow cuisine is often assumed to be the same as Cantonese due to the city’s proximity to Hong Kong, but it’s actually quite unique. Most foods are steamed or braised rather than fried, and the most popular dishes from the region include an oyster omelette and a goose dish made with a lu shui master broth, which is often kept bubbling away in a pot for months at a time. It’s also one of the few parts of China to use fish sauce – something we tend to associate more with places like Vietnam and Thailand.
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Chiu Chow chilli oil: the story behind Guangdong’s secret sauce