Fushun Soft Tofu Dipping Sauce 富顺豆花蘸水

Fushun Soft Tofu Dipping Sauce (富顺豆花蘸水) is the chilli dip that goes with Fushun douhua (富顺豆花), the soft bean curd of Fushun County (富顺县) in Zigong (自贡), Sichuan. Chinese Wikipedia lists the dipping sauce, together with Fushun chilli sauce (富顺香辣酱), as a Chinese geographical indication product.

Ingredients

Xinhua Finance reports that the dip is made with chilli, several traditional Chinese medicinal herbs and natural spices. It is also made commercially: Meile Food Co. (美乐食品有限公司) of Fushun, founded in 1984 and working mainly with chilli, Sichuan pepper and soybeans, produces Fushun douhua dipping sauce alongside its Fushun chilli sauce.

Flavour and texture

Xinhua Finance describes the sauce as fragrant, spicy, fresh and mellow. Huang Guangquan (黄光全), who runs the Huang Liu douhua shop (黄六豆花店) in Fushun, put it the same way: Fushun douhua is tender, soft, white and fragrant, and its dip fragrant, spicy, fresh and mellow.

Where it comes from

Fushun prospered on salt, and Xinhua links its bean curd to danba (胆巴), the brine left over from salt-making, which turns the soy milk into a bean curd as white as jade. The Sichuan Economic Daily places both Fushun douhua and its dipping sauce within the well-salt culture of a county with more than 1,400 years of history, and notes that the plain, delicate bean curd stands apart within Zigong's strongly flavoured yanbang (salt merchants') cuisine (盐帮菜). The Fushun douhua making technique entered Sichuan's provincial intangible cultural heritage list in 2007, in its first batch.