![]() What led you to that decision and what does the name change mean to you? Tell us more about the decision to change your name back to your given name, Jing. Food became a universal language for me to relate to people, including my family. When I got to China, it was such a revelation: I was both similar to, and very different from, the people there. I visited family in Chengdu often when I was growing up, and when I was old enough to travel on my own, I felt the pull to explore where I came from. What sparked your desire to go back to Chengdu? Can you talk about what inspired you to engage more deeply with your heritage? Get Ready to Travel to Central China From the Comfort of Home → And then, I felt really compelled to share everything I discovered, and still do as I keep learning. So food played a dual role in my rediscovery of my personal roots, as well as the roots of Sichuan cuisine. Food also became a way to connect with my family in Chengdu, who I didn’t know very well until I returned. Returning to Chengdu as a young adult and experiencing how complex and nuanced the flavors of Sichuan cuisine are - and realizing how little the Western world knows about it! - made me want to really dive in to this 5,000 year-old tradition and learn all that I could. I was born in Chengdu, but spent much of my young life moving every year. I’m not the first person to make chili crisp, but the recipe is 100% my expression of the sauce, and Fly By Jing’s version is the first all-natural chili crisp made in China and I think that’s a pretty big deal.īacking up a little bit, what would you say was the turning point for you, in discovering what you wanted to do with your career? I realized I wanted to make it as a retail food product because it became a conversation starter with diners, and I saw an opportunity to produce it in my hometown of Chengdu. What’s now the Sichuan Chili Crisp sauce was a recipe I developed as a base for many of the dishes I’d cook. ![]() It started as an underground dinner series, where I’d cook all over the world and introduce diners to the layers of flavor in Sichuan cuisine. “Everything is authentic to someone’s experience.” It’s about a conversation, one that Gao wants to have with anyone and everyone, about Sichuan cuisine: “It’s about bringing people around the table for a shared understanding, uniting them with amazing flavors.“ I’m not the first person to make chili crisp, but the recipe is 100% my expression of the sauce.”Ĭould you briefly share what led you to creating Fly By Jing? What did you feel like was missing in the space, and what did you want to accomplish?į ly By Jing has gone through a few iterations. ![]() “I’m not saying this is what Sichuan food is,” she says. Gao stresses her product is about her own expression of Chinese flavor. But people compare them because there aren’t many on sale here. The only similarity between her sauce and Lao Gan Ma is that they’re both oil-based chili sauces. She says that is like comparing Cholula to Frank’s RedHot because they are both vinegar-based hot sauces. At the same time, she saw how Westerners looked at Chinese food-why they expected everything to be cheap and made from low-budget filler ingredients-and the systemic biases that prevented the conversation around this cuisine from being about quality, rather than price.Īs she dives headlong into a wider audience, that growth means overcoming questions of authenticity and deflecting the inevitable comparison to Lao Gan Ma, the beloved and well-established brand of chili crisp and Chinese-style hot sauce. As she took her pop-up dinners from Shanghai to New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and the U.S., Gao says she saw the reactions people had to ingredients and dishes they hadn’t tasted before-at least in part because so much of the cuisine never even made it out of China. Gao founded an award-winning fast-casual restaurant in Shanghai, then moved on to cooking the foods she remembered in her private kitchen restaurant. “There’s so much depth and complexity to Chinese food, and nobody knew about it,” she says. The sauce’s creation also stemmed from her own realization that she’d drifted away from the cooking of her native Chengdu.Īfter growing up all over the world, Gao returned to Asia as an adult, working for Procter & Gamble, and realized she wasn’t the only one missing out on those specific flavors. “I wish I could sit down and tell each customer the backstory.” Gao created the sauce to help people taste Sichuan cuisine in a way they might not have before, to get them talking about the flavors and quality they might not have associated with it previously. “I want to have a dialogue,” she says, to share the flavors she loves, to exchange and engage with people about them. Customers are intrigued, and to Gao, that’s part of the point.
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