I used to enjoy perusing the “hot sauce aisle” in my local Great Wall Asian supermarket and this jar looked great. The jar said “spicy chili crisp”, which I also joke are the 3 most wonderful words in the English language. I also liked that it looked like the lady was angry (I chalked it up to cultural differences in marketing):
> “Lao Gan Ma deliberately places an extraordinary average-looking and old Chinese female on its product package, which conversely arouses strong curiosities of foreign consumers,” it says.
It’s a staple in my kitchen (along with Lee Kim Kee’s Chiu Chow Chili Oil and Momofuku’s chili oil) and happy that they’ve seen the success they have.
I just realized if they wanted to be cute here, Lao Gan Ma sounds kind of like “Love, Grandma” :-)
They add a (slightly spicy) nice warm blanket of flavor to a bunch of things while enhancing the original flavor of the dish (which is likely what the msg is doing)
