Fly By Jing’s Founder Just Dropped a Spicy New Cookbook

These days, people get as excited about food as they used to about rock n’ roll. Chefs, creators, and even food business owners reach the same levels of stardom as bands like Pavement Led Zeppelin once did. Example: The late Jimmy Buffett (RIP, marg king) was on the cover of People last week, but for the upcoming October 2 issue, it’s chef Gordon Ramsay who will be taking center stage. Or, take Fly By Jing, a company that makes Chinese condiments and pantry staples—like Sichuan chili crisp, Zhong sauce, mala spice, and Tribute Pepper oil—and has become so popular that it’s covered on CBS Mornings and (pretty regularly, actually) in The New York Times (which also covers, you know, stuff like presidential elections, climate change, and the economy). As far as popular condiments go, Hellmann’s Mayonnaise has about 35,000 Instagram followers, Tabasco has 102,000, and Fly By Jing, by comparison, has a whopping 120,000 followers on the social media platform. (It’s hard to believe, but the brand even has 15,000 more followers than Pavement!) The company’s addictive, spicy sauces (for the record, we love them) have made it a legitimate social and cultural force. Welcome to 2023. 

For Jing Gao, the founder and CEO of Fly By Jing, it's all been part of a journey to reconnect to her roots through food. Today, her products can be found everywhere from Whole Foods and Target to Costco, all of whom sought her out—a pretty rare thing for businesses fighting over valuable shelf space. Gao’s success story began almost a decade ago, when she moved to Shanghai to start a restaurant. Within a few years, she was running pop-ups all over the world, and taking first steps to branding and retailing her beloved chili crisp. Today, Gao is releasing her first official cookbook, The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp, which contains not only a ton of her favorite classic Chinese comfort dishes (think mapo tofu, fish-fragrant crispy eggplant, and Kung Pao shrimp), but also the recipes for Fly By Jing’s most beloved products, like Sichuan chili crisp, tribute pepper oil, mala spice mix, Zhong sauce, and chili crisp vinaigrette. (If you got even slightly excited by that previous sentence, just go ahead and smash the order button on her new book here.) Below, we talked to Gao about why her chili crisp is so unique, where to start cooking in her new book, and the weirdest things she’s seen people put chili crisp on.

VICE: Hi, Jing! I learned a lot about you from reading this cookbook. For example, I didn’t know that you’d started a restaurant in Shanghai. Can you tell us a little more about that?

Jing Gao: That was my first venture in food. It was back in 2016—I originally moved to Shanghai for a tech job, and it was when I was there that I started to reconnect to my roots through food, [which] became a vessel for me to find identity and also self expression. I ended up quitting my job and opening a restaurant. That restaurant was called Baoism—it was a regional Chinese fast casual eatery that featured baos and bowls and sides that you could mix and match, like a Chipotle or something like that. It celebrated regional Chinese flavors. That was my first project in food. It ended up doing well, like winning awards—it was on Wallpaper, and New York Magazine covered it.

Through that experience, I realized I wanted to do something that reached even more people. Fly By Jing was born from that. I started doing these underground pop-up supper club dinners in Shanghai and also across China, across the world, really. A lot of the recipes from the book are inspired by the dishes I was making during that time period. Also, chili crisp, Zhong sauce, mala spice… they all came from those recipes. They were flavor bases that I was making in big batches, because I had to travel with them. And [at the time], they were completely inaccessible anywhere outside of China. 

You talk in the book about how chili crisp is very personal—each version depends on the textures and flavors you like. At what point did you finalize the recipe for what you’re selling now? 

It’s extremely hard to find some of these ingredients that we put into our products—they’re literally from the countryside in my hometown. The chili crisp alone has 18 ingredients, so it’s saving you a lot of time and work to be able to easily add those flavors to whatever you’re cooking. The Zhong sauce was inspired by a favorite dish of mine growing up called Zhong dumplings, a street snack. That sauce was, like, so good to me, and I wanted to capture it and apply it to a lot of different things. Over probably two years of doing the Fly By Jing supper clubs and the traveling pop-ups, that’s when I started to bottle it, give it away to friends and family at first, and then started selling it locally in Shanghai. I will say that the version that we sell today is very much the same as what I was making back then in my kitchen.

Let’s talk about the new cookbook. What kinds of dishes can people expect to find in The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp?

I like to call the dishes “Sichuan soul food.” It’s very much comfort food—it’s easy and accessible, especially with the ease and convenience of Fly By Jing’s pantry goods and spices, it’s even more accessible to be able to make [these dishes] easily at home.

I would describe [the food in the book] as rooted in tradition, but made for the way we eat today. As much as it’s more quote-unquote authentic than you can get anywhere else, since this is truly from the source and crafted at the source, that doesn’t mean you have to only eat it on classic Sichuan dishes. You can make it your own—you can put it on whatever you want. It’s versatile enough that it’ll fit into your life, whether it’s your eggs in the morning, a salad, adapting a mapo tofu recipe so that it’s fast and easy for your daily routine. It’s kind of an introduction to my style of Sichuan cooking.

In the book, you tell people to “get weird and get bold,” and you mention putting chili oil on things like fruit and ice cream. What are some of the weirdest or most interesting things you’ve heard of people putting your products on?

I see people doing funky things all the time. I love the combination of sweet and savory, so chili crisp or Tribute Pepper oil—which is not spicy, but it has the tingling, citrusy quality—is really interesting on a lot of fruit. We’ve seen chili crisp on bananas, on apple pie, on chocolate chip cookies. Obviously, most people who have chili crisp at home have tried it on ice cream by now, and it just works. I really like it in beverages, like in cocktails. 

The Negroni recipe in this book looks awesome.

Baijiu is an interesting liquor—it’s China’s national liquor. It’s the most consumed alcohol, I think, in the world. It’s also very misunderstood, just like a lot of other things in Chinese cuisine. People compare it to paint thinner, or say it’s inedible, that it’s disgusting. But, actually, if you take the time and get to know it and understand all the different types and styles and brands, this alcohol has been made for thousands of years. Baijiu also originates from Sichuan. The reason it goes so well with Chinese food is because it’s made from some of the same ingredients—it’s made from rice, sorghum, millet, things that are being used in the cuisine. 

When writing this book, were you worried at all about basically giving away all the recipes for your most popular products?

I'm not worried, because what makes us special is the soul of the ingredients, and the ingredients are very difficult to source. They don’t exist here, so you actually can’t replicate the flavors [laughs], even if you have the exact same recipe. It’s not as easy as just switching from [ingredient] A to B; even an ingredient that’s grown one town away will make the entire product taste different. There’s a lot of specificity in the provenance of the ingredients that impact the flavor on a level that cannot be overstated. Even I can't replicate the flavors here in L.A. if I don’t have the source ingredients. Ninety percent of the magic is in the ingredients themselves.

If someone who has never tried your products wanted to cook from the book, what’s the first dish you’d recommend?

I would say an easy one would be the cold sesame noodles. I love the mapo tofu—it’s a dish that sounds more complicated than it is, and I think people are always surprised when they cook it and it turns out so quick and delicious. I’d probably start with those two.

What have you learned from putting your story and your products into a cookbook and bringing them into people’s homes in this way?

I definitely think this cookbook is the culmination of a long journey. It really started from when I was born and how I was raised, living all over the world. I was very lost and had no sense of identity. If I didn’t have that [experience], I wouldn’t have been so obsessed with searching for it when I was in China. I think that very personal quest turned into something a lot bigger than myself when I realized the impact I could potentially make by bringing these flavors to a wider audience and demystifying it, making Chinese food less demonized and more accepted and celebrated. This entire journey has helped me come back to myself as well. 

Buy The Book of Sichuan Chili Crisp on Amazon.

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