La Tour Brewery Taipei szechuan beer sauce?

September 22, 2024 10:03 PM

This is very much a ridiculous long shot, but when I was last in Taipei I went to La Tour and they had an excellent "szechuan beer sauce" for their fried chicken. The waiter did not know the recipe, but I want to recreate it.

La Tour (#8, Lane 84, Yanping S Rd) has a fried chicken appetizer that arrives with an orange'ish mayo-based dipping sauce. It's more complicated than simply adding Lao Gan Ma to Kewpie, but it is something along those lines. If you search for them on Google Maps the 15th photo (at present) is an accurate representation.

So: if you were going to make an LGM-aligned mayo sauce that features beer, how would you do it? It was good enough that the nicely-fried chicken existed mostly as a foil to the sauce, and as a mechanism to grab more of it.

I'm not completely wedded to the idea of starting with Lao Gan Ma plus Kewpie, but it does seem like it gets me into the ballpark faster than starting from scratch.

For example: add lemon to cut the chicken grease? Black pepper, almost certainly, and maybe fish sauce in a small quantity.

I realize that unless you've been to La Tour we're all shooting in the dark, so perhaps the question can be thought of as "how would you make the most ridiculously great sauce based on the name Szechuan Beer Sauce?"

posted by aramaic to Food & Drink (8 answers total)

Ahem, I've zero idea what you ate, but I did some digging into the restaurant's dishes and it seems there's a dish 啤酒雞腿搭花椒啤酒醬 "Beer-battered fried chicken with Sichuan pepper beer sauce", which replaced the item 啤酒雞腿鹹蛋塔塔醬 "Beer-battered fried chicken & salted egg with tartar sauce" from an older menu. So maybe tartar sauce x szechuan pepper (huajiao) oil could be an evolutionary starting point in your cross-pollination experiments?

The Lao Gan Ma would be defined by the copious amount of fermented soy beans (and MSG) in it (with little to no szechuan pepper, depending on the variant), so that doesn't sound like it based on the little info we have about the sauce.
posted by runcifex at 3:21 AM on September 23

Now you've got me all excited about this sauce.
Maybe try making this, then when cool, do a blend with the Kewpie. I'm sure it will be great even if it's not what you had.
posted by superelastic at 4:30 AM on September 23

Here's a recipe for salted egg yolk sauce, it's similar to mayonnaise in that it uses egg yolks to incorporate oil. There's also grainier, more custard-like versions called things like quicksand or sand sauce. You can get it in jars, I'd guess they start with that and add in some of their beer and a chilli oil like you're thinking.
posted by lucidium at 5:32 AM on September 23

I wonder if they cooked it down, because beer in any quantity sufficient to add that flavor will make the sauce really watery. Or maybe it had plenty of corn starch or other thickeners, but I feel like cooking it down would be tastier and perhaps more in line with a nice restaurant. Along those lines, you could do something slightly crazy like using Marmite to get that beery yeasty flavor without all the water.

Also I'd strongly recommend fresh-ground long pepper (Piper longum, available at most Asian markets) over black pepper. It's brighter and more traditional and I think important if you're using any more than tiny amounts. You can also get whole sichuan pepper (not a pepper*) and grind it, which is much more aromatic than getting a bit in a LGM sauce product. *NB, there is also a type of red capsicum favored in Sichuan that sometimes is known as Sichuan red pepper powder or similar. This is perhaps obviously a totally different thing, but also good and a decent bet to add heat (the sichuan pepper/prickly ash has almost no heat, more floral/aromatic notes).

I'd use Chinese black vinegar for extra tartness over lemon, but I love that stuff in almost any application so I'm biased. Citric acid powder is another possibility if you want to avoid it getting watery.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:00 AM on September 23

As circumstantial evidence for salted egg yolk sauce with fried chicken being A Thing, here's a Vogue Taiwan ad for "Beer Fried Chicken with salted egg golden sauce".
posted by lucidium at 8:03 AM on September 23

Maybe whisk a strong flavoured beer into sesame paste, in the same manner as making tahini sauce, and then incorporate that into the spiced mayo? The nutty sesame should bring out the beer flavour...

Count me also very excited about the idea of this sauce. If your experiments get to something close or differently amazing, I'd love to hear the results.
posted by protorp at 11:54 AM on September 23

Thank you everyone for your suggestions thus far, I'm particularly encouraged by the salt-yolk thing, and long pepper.

...It's going to take a number of iterations I think, but fingers crossed!

I'm leaving this open, in case new ideas pop up.
posted by aramaic at 6:13 PM on September 23

instead of Lao Gan Ma, consider Pixian Doubanjiang
posted by are-coral-made at 3:23 AM on September 24