We are Taylor and Fongchong, and The Mala Market Blog is where we document our adventures in cooking Sichuan food and invite others to share their knowledge of regional Chinese cuisines. Our blog started in 2014 and eventually grew to include The Mala Market, America’s source for premium Sichuan ingredients.

Taylor is CEO, importer, cook and writer, and Fongchong is spice packager, translator and chief taster. One of us joined a new family in America at age 11 and refused to eat anything but real Chinese food, and the other one had to learn in a hurry how to cook it for her.

We’ve discovered through the years that the secret to making food that tastes like it would in China is using the same ingredients that are used in China. The Mala Market is designed to help American cooks do just that, providing premium and hard-to-find Sichuan spices and sauces as well as a curated selection of Chinese pantry items and Chinese cooking starter kits.

Sichuan málà—numbing and spicy—is our shared, mother-daughter obsession, though, as in Sichuan itself, you’ll find plenty of mild recipes on our blog and non-spicy Chinese products in our shop. We hope you’ll find both the ingredients and instruction helpful, and, as always, we look forward to hearing from you in the blog comments, on social media or via email through the little envelope icon on the main Mala Market page.