Chili Crisp: The Complete Guide to the Crunchy Chile Oil That Ate the Internet, and How to Use It Beyond Noodles
Chili crisp is the condiment of the last decade, and the reason is in the name. Chile oil, the red oil that sits on every table in Sichuan, is hot and fragrant but it is liquid; you pour it. Chili crisp is the same oil with everything that was fried in it left behind: crumbled chile, slivers of garlic and shallot fried to a shatter, sometimes fermented soybeans, peanuts or sesame, so that a spoonful is half oil and half crunch. That texture is what made it addictive, and it is why a jar that started as a home cook's preserve in a Chinese province became something people put on ice cream in Brooklyn. This guide covers what it is, how it is made, how it differs from its cousins, the jars on our shelf, and a long list of things it belongs on that are not noodles.
Where it came from
The idea is old and regional. Chile oil with solids, you la jiao, is a household condiment across Sichuan, Guizhou, Hunan and Yunnan, made at home by frying dried chile with aromatics in oil and keeping the lot in a jar. It became a commercial product in 1997 when a Guizhou restaurant owner named Tao Huabi began bottling her house version under a label with her own face on it, and that brand became the best-selling chile condiment in China and, through Asian groceries, the cult jar of American cooks in the 2010s. A wave of small producers then made their own: Sichuan-style versions built on the numbing ma of Sichuan pepper, garlic-heavy versions, versions with black beans, mushrooms, seaweed or nuts, and the category acquired its English name. Our hot sauce guide treats it as the one great hot condiment that is not a sauce.
How it is made
The method is frying, then infusing. Aromatics, most often garlic and shallot, are sliced thin and fried slowly in neutral oil until they are golden and crisp, then lifted out before they burn. Dried chiles, crushed or flaked, are added to the hot oil along with any spices, Sichuan pepper, star anise, cassia, black cardamom, and the oil is held below smoking until it turns deep red and the kitchen smells of toasted chile. The fried aromatics go back in with salt, sugar, and often fermented soybeans, MSG or mushroom powder for savory depth, and the whole thing rests for a day so the flavors settle. The variables are the chile, which decides the heat and the color; the ratio of solids to oil, which decides whether it is a crisp or an oil; and the aromatics, which decide whether it tastes of garlic, of fermented bean, of numbing pepper or of something else entirely.
Crisp, oil, sambal, kosho: the cousins
Chili oil is the same infusion strained or left mostly liquid; it is for drizzling and for dipping sauces, and it is hotter per spoon because there is no crunch to dilute it. Sambal is the Malaysian and Indonesian chile paste, fresh or cooked, built on chile, shallot, garlic and often shrimp paste or lime; it is a paste rather than a fried crisp, and Auria's lime leaf sambal, from a Malaysian-American cook working her grandmother's recipes, is the version on our shelf, bright with makrut lime leaf and made for rice, eggs and grilled fish. Yuzu kosho and kanzuri are Japan's fermented chile pastes, built on citrus and salt rather than fried oil, which our yuzu guide covers; kanzuri does the deep-savory job of a chili crisp with fermentation instead of frying. Harissa is the North African cousin, a paste of dried chile, garlic and spice. The crisp is the only one of the family defined by texture.
The jars on our shelf
Mama Teav's Hot Garlic Chili Crisp is the pure form: heavy on fried garlic, generous with crunch, a clean chile heat that builds rather than punches, and a short ingredient list from a small California maker built on a Cambodian-American family recipe. It is the jar to start with. For the sesame-and-chile end of the same street, Superlova's Dan Dan spicy sesame sauce is the sauce of Chengdu's famous street noodles, sesame paste, chile oil and Sichuan pepper, ready to toss with hot noodles and a spoon of the cooking water, and May May creamy sesame sauce is its gentler sibling for cold noodles, dumplings and a cucumber salad. The ramen and soba noodles on the same shelf are the fastest route from jar to dinner. Chili crisp variations from other makers appear in the Asian pantry collection when in stock, and the book by James Park on the same shelf has fifty more uses than the twenty below.
Twenty things that are not noodles
A fried egg, first and always, on rice or toast. Scrambled eggs, folded in at the end. Avocado on toast. Plain rice with butter. A bowl of brothy beans. Roasted potatoes, tossed while hot. A baked sweet potato with yogurt. Steamed broccoli or green beans. A grilled cheese, spread inside. Pizza, instead of the pepper flakes. Vanilla ice cream, a small spoon, and do not argue until you have tried it. A tin of sardines on toast. Smoked salmon or cured fish, where the crisp meets the oil. Cold chicken. A burger. Cottage cheese or labneh as a dip. Hummus. Popcorn, drizzled. Cucumber salad with a little vinegar. A bowl of oatmeal with a soft egg, which is a savory breakfast that will change your mornings.
How to use it well
Stir the jar before every spoon, because the crisp sinks. Use the solids and the oil together; the oil carries the flavor, the solids carry the crunch. Add it at the end, off the heat, where the fried garlic stays crisp; cooked into a dish it softens and turns to plain chile oil, which is fine but not the point. Balance it with something cool or rich: yogurt, egg yolk, cheese, avocado, butter. And taste your jar before you dose, because a Sichuan-pepper crisp numbs, a garlic crisp does not, and the heat between jars varies as much as between hot sauces.
Keeping it
The oil preserves it. An opened jar keeps for months in a cool cupboard and longer in the refrigerator, where the oil clouds harmlessly and clears again at room temperature. The crunch fades slowly as the solids absorb oil, so a jar is best in its first few months. If the garlic ever tastes bitter or the oil smells of paint, it is old. The jars are at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. Start with a fried egg. Everyone does.
