The Search for Lajiao
Lajiao-辣椒 in Chinese refers to the spices that are put into dishes to make them hot (la-辣). There are millions of different kinds of lajiao as well as soy sauce－酱油, vinegar－醋, and sesame oil－香油–all major Chinese cooking ingredients.
In the store, there are several 8 foot tall selves solely devoted to these ingredients. I can read enough Chinese to know if the bottle is soy sauce, vinegar, or sesame oil, but I didn’t know the difference between the hundreds of brands so I just randomly grabbed bottles. My cousin came over to our apartment for dinner and told me I got all the wrong brands!
Back to the lajiao, there is exactly one type of lajiao I love and of course I don’t know the name of it. So Joey and I went searching in the grocery stores, each time choosing a random lajiao that looks sort of similar from a selection of over 50 different kinds. We went to the grocery store 3 times on consecutive days, each time searching for the right lajiao having tested the one we bought the day before and concluding it was wrong. By the time my cousin came to visit, we had bought 4 different kinds of the wrong lajiao, all of which I don’t like to eat or cook with! She told me that the kind I liked, you can only buy in Guiyang so I was very sad. Luckily she had brought some with her and gave me a small bag of it.
