Although The Golden Duck has only been around for about three years, the home-grown gourmet snack company is well-known for transforming our favourite complex dishes into flavourful snacks! I’m sure we all know and love their four award-winning snacks; Salted Egg Yolk Potato Crisps, Salted Egg Fish Skin Crunchy Crisps, Singapore Chilli Crab Seaweed Tempura and Salted Egg Crab Seaweed Tempura.
After a long wait, The Golden Duck has finally launched a new addition to their product line-up – the Sichuan Mala Hot Pot Fragrant Mix! To celebrate the launch, The Golden Duck invited us to a gourmet snack workshop. Being Mala lovers, we didn’t have to think twice about attending.
Like your usual Mala dish, the Sichuan Mala Hot Pot Fragrant Mix includes three must-have hotpot ingredients; The Golden Duck’s signature fish skin, fluffy beancurd skin and a trio of straw, oyster and shiitake mushrooms. These are then combined with a secret blend of spices, such as real Sichuan peppercorns, cumin, fennel, coriander, chillies, celery leaves and sesame seeds.
We then got a sneak peek into the creation of the snack by customising our very own Sichuan Mala Hot Pot snack!
We first chose our preferred proportions of beancurd skin, mushrooms and, of course, The Golden Duck’s signature fish skin. We then donned our aprons and headed to the kitchen. With the help of Chef Heng and Chef Max, we added chilli oil and the secret blend of spices to our bowl of ingredients. After a good toss, the well-coated ingredients are then placed into the oven to bake for about half a minute.
Hot from the oven, we garnished our snack with coriander and added a side of instant noodles in true Mala style. And voila, our very own customised Sichuan Mala Hot Pot snack is ready to be devoured!
As we were about to take the first bite, we caught a whiff of the snack. The aroma is really just like a mala hotpot! It didn’t take us long to start wolfing down the delectable snack. After a few bites, the familiar slow burn started to creep up on us and the mouth-numbing commences.
Although The Golden Duck is a bit late to jump on the Mala craze, they wanted to create a product that really captures the real taste of Mala hotpot. Their team spent a whopping nine months and 30 rounds of research and development to arrive at the Sichuan Mala Hot Pot Fragrant Mix. The team even spent half a year traversing cities in China to learn Sichuan cuisine in its traditional form. Now that’s what we call dedication!
Just as we thought that the Sichuan Mala Hot Pot Fragrant Mix couldn’t get any better than that, The Golden Duck surprised us with a special announcement. They also have a Sichuan Mala Hot Hot Pot Fragrant Mix, a spicier and more mouth-numbing snack! While the Sichuan Mala Hot Pot Fragrant Mix has a spice level of 6 and a numbing level of 4, the hot hot version has a spice level of 9 and a numbing level of 7! This is definitely not a snack for the faint-hearted.
For now, get your hands on the Sichuan Mala Hot Pot Fragrant Mix available exclusively first at TGD stores and online store for SGD 7. This might just be your new favourite!
