The burlap sack is big enough for a grown man’s body. It bulges with the weight of a hundred kilos of shallots, but there is a problem. These aren’t the shallots I had ordered, the round ones that easily peel back to reveal a purple-hued flesh. These are a different variety, with smaller elongated sections clustered tightly in a bulb, each piece ranging in size from half a pinky to a thumb. The color and even the taste are the same, but these shallots are threatening to ruin my life.

Two workers hack fruitlessly at the tight layers of skin around each tiny onion with blunt cleavers. Seeing my puzzlement, one of them offers, “We call these 火葱 huocong. They grow in the countryside around here.” Huocong means “fire onion.” They do resemble little flames, and so does my current state of mind. The sack of onions seems to grow larger with every passing minute. We are going to be here a while.

I found myself here after a long and winding search for a factory to mass-produce a chilli sauce I’d been making out of my kitchen in Shanghai. This facility on the outskirts of Chengdu, which specializes in doubanjiang (fermented bean paste) and hot pot seasoning, is one of the very few that will entertain my limited run size. They have also assured me they can export to the US.

With its decade-long experience co-packing sauces, the factory should be guiding me through scaled production. But my process is so unlike anything they’ve ever done, they are deferring to me to instruct them. That was the first mistake.