Chili oil crisp was always something I never gave much thought about; it’s not something I hadn’t ever seen before, after all, it’s almost always at the table whenever you go to an actual sit-down Chinese restaurant.  I’ve never really been compelled to try it before, but over the course of the last year or so, I’ve heard occasional remarks about people who love this particular brand of chili oil crisp, Lao Gan Ma, and how it is one of those condiments that goes with everything, almost like a Chinese version of Frank’s Red Hot or something.

I was at the Asian market a little while ago, and I saw an endcap display where Lao Gan Ma was on sale, and I figured ehh, why not, no time like the present to give it a whirl.  When I brought it home, I tasted it straight, and it was good, but I didn’t really see what all the fuss was all about.  Most people talked about how it went great on eggs, but I can’t exactly eat eggs straight, so that was out of the question, but I could imagine different things that it might go well with, but not many things that I was going to make any time soon.

I found it went okay with curry, but when the day is over, I preferred adding chipotles to my curry as my preferred heat additive, and although I liked the Lao Gan Ma, I knew I had yet to find the right thing to add it to, to really unlock its potential for my palette.

Recently, The Algorithm has been showing me content of all these people who were making these cucumber salads, touting their ease, and general low-cost, when combined with stuff like canned tuna, celery, dill, salt and pepper, with some people utilizing mayo, and others using combinations of cottage cheese and/or Greek yogurt.

Impressionable as I sometimes can be, I decided to give a flyer to one of these recipes, since they seemed a little bit on the healthier side, while being lower on the carbohydrate scale; and it was pretty good, but I felt that it was something that probably would taste great with some sort of hot sauce . . . or some chili oil crisp.

And it was in this union of a creamy cucumber tuna salad, and Lao Gan Ma chili oil crisp, I unlocked this mega combo, where the creamy base of the salad, tempers a little bit of the heat of the chili oil crisp, and they go together in a fantastic combination to where I’m crushing half the bowl of the salad in one sitting, and emptying out a third of my jar of chili oil crisp.

Sure, a hot sauce like Frank’s would probably be good with this cucumber tuna salad, but it wouldn’t give it the satisfying crunch that Lao Gan Ma crispy chilis do, and now I’m basically at a stage of my life where I’m wondering where the heck this stuff has been throughout it, and how excited my inner big back is at seemingly finding the key to unlocking the potential of chili oil crisp, and deliberating future foods that it could probably go great with now as well.