Garlic Chili Sauce

A pretty simple sauce that tastes great and works well for lots of savory meat dishes. You could probably make this in bulk and save it in the fridge.

Stuff you'll need

1. Garlic
2. Chili powder (or dried chilis)
3. Sichuan peppercorns
4. Oil (lard or butter would probably be tasty instead of a neutral oil)
5. Some lemon juice
6. Salt
7. MSG

Preparation

Crush up your dried chilis and sichuan peppercorns into a relatively fine powder. Chop the garlic into a very fine dice or even a paste. Heat up some oil on medium-low temperature. Add in the garlic, chili powder, and sichuan peppercorn powder, and keep stirring. After some time, add a little lemon juice. Add some salt and MSG too to boost the flavors even more. That's it!

Notes

Be gentle and don't rush it. Garlic can burn easily at high temperatures. The goal is to allow the oil to coax out the flavors of the garlic and chili powder without burning it and adding really bitter flavors. Feel free to adjust the ratios of the ingredients as you like. Don't like the numbing flavor? Get rid of the sichuan peppercorns.

The lemon juice is there just to balance the greasiness of the sauce. It's probably possible to emulsify the lemon juice and the oil so that the resulting sauce is more cohesive, but I haven't figured out a good way to do it yet. (I tried adding corn starch to the lemon juice before adding it to the sauce, but this didn't work too well. My ratios of starch to juice to oil are probably off. I'm still using my feelings to figure this out too!)

This is extremely basic. In sichuan, they'll probably use way more spices, like cloves, cardamom, star anise, tangerine peel, sand ginger, etc. The result is a deeper, richer, more complex sauce, but it also takes a lot more time, effort to source these spices, and necessitates making the sauce in batch because of how flavorful some of these spices are. As with most of my recipes, this is just a template and a stepping stone for taking this process further and building greater more tastier sauces.