No food is safe from my crispy chilli oil obsession – and I’m not alone

My friend Caroline, who recently shamed me by ordering no fewer than 10 sachets of mayonnaise with her fish supper, is fond of mocking my love of what she terms “dry food”. I don’t want vinegar on my chips, I don’t want HP on my bacon bap and I especially don’t want ketchup with my steak … but I will admit to a crispy chilli oil fixation. This vivid, red, oily muddle of dried chilli flakes, chewy garlic crisps and chopped peanuts, which originates from Guizhou in south-western China, has the same intensely savoury heat that I love about mustard, but with added textural thrills. I’ll spoon it on everything from scrambled eggs to salad, pasta to pulses – nothing is safe.

My habit has only been exacerbated by recently testing recipes for the homemade variety, not that there aren’t many excellent ready-made options (the original, Lao Gan Ma, is hard to beat, and Tom Kerridge is a big fan, too). With a little effort, you can tweak the balance of flavour, and indeed the ingredients, so it hits the bullseye of your own palate. The results will be in Feast this Saturday (and are available in the Feast app now), but I can reveal that, unlike in Ixta Belfrage’s fresh take on the idea, there’s no tomato or maple syrup involved.

Should mine not float your boat, Yotam Ottolenghi has a coconut and peanut version, as well as a more festive spin featuring star anise, cinnamon and ginger (remember, chilli oil is not just for Christmas), while Michael Sun offers a more canonical and laid-back take (“eyeball everything”).

Whether or not your glut of crispy chilli oil is homemade, you have plenty of options for using it up. Lee Tiernan’s mapo tofu with fried eggs, a quickfire version of the one latterly on the menu at London’s FKABAM, is on my list to try, while Meera Sodha’s roast celeriac with chive chilli oil and Georgina Hayden’s roast squash with tahini and chilli crisp feel pleasingly autumnal; the latter’s herby, crispy rice, shallot and lemon salad might fit the bill better if the weather has improved since the time of writing. That said, we’re coming to the end of sweetcorn season, which is reason enough to treat yourself to Alice Zaslavsky’s charred and creamed corn with lemon spring onion oil (and chilli crisp, pictured top).

Stuck at my kitchen table in rainy London, I support the idea of transporting myself to Shanghai with Michael Zee’s homage to Wei Xiang Zhai’s sesame paste noodles. And even if I can’t quite justify making Andrew McConnell’s prawn and chicken dumplings this evening, the spiced chilli vinegar he serves with them would be delicious with a packet of something similar from the freezer. Although, actually, it might be more of a day for Suzie Lee’s crispy chilli egg instant noodle bowl, possibly without the frankfurter octopus, or my own take on Chengdu’s famous dan dan noodles.

Last, although I haven’t yet bought the ice-cream to give it a go, the viral chilli crisp soft-serve sundaes from a few years ago feel ripe for revisiting here. The New York Times’s take with a peanut streusel is behind a paywall, but this one is free. Please do tag me if you make it!

The best thing I listened to | OK, this isn’t quite true, not least because I can never listen to myself, but if you would like to, my paean to butter (one of the few things I love more than chilli crisp) for Radio 4’s Food Programme is on BBC Sounds. It features Somerset’s Ivy House and Wyke farms, Kerrygold, Darina Allen’s Ballymaloe butter discos and Cork’s fabulous butter museum, where I was let loose on an antique dash churn. Thank goodness I didn’t break it.

Adventures in tofish | I had an excellent dinner with my friend Martha at Tofu Vegan in north London. Neither of us is plant-based, but we are big fans of their homemade wibbly, creamy tofu. The dish that made a real impression, however, was the “twice-cooked fisc”: battered bean curd with the fluffy texture of fishcakes and a distinctly marine flavour thanks to its seaweed topping. Despite asking, we left not much the wiser as to how they made it, so any and all intel about a method would be appreciated. In the meantime, my tofish recipe is the next best thing.

Harvest festivals | Looking ahead, my weeks in food to come will be punctuated by food festivals. There’s Ludlow (12-13 September) and Abergavenny (19-21 September), followed by Dartmouth in late October. I’ll be popping up at all of them to talk about my new travelogue, Peach Street to Lobster Lane: Coast to Coast in Search of Real American Cuisine, along with fellow Feast contributors including Thomasina Miers, Ixta Belfrage, Julie Lin and Romy Gill. Please do come and say hi if you’re there.

Revelation of the week | Making lemon sorbet a few weeks ago, I realised my ice-cream maker (a refurbished Gaggia still going strong well over a decade after I acquired it) held the potential to realise a long-cherished dream: the manufacture of frozen margaritas. My first attempt was slightly chaotic (I’d forgotten to dilute the mixture for it to freeze), but we all had fun. One part tequila, to 0.7 parts water, 0.5 parts triple sec and lime juice, and 0.3 parts simple syrup, seemed to hit the sweet and sour spot.

The Duck & Rice, London | ​This new extravagant outpost of the original Duck & Rice is housed in Battersea power station, and has “the dystopian address of ‘Unit L1-003, Level 1, Phase 2’, and [is] next to a champagne bar called Control Room B”, writes Grace Dent, who was fascinated by the location but underwhelmed by the food. The “main courses were filling, but largely unmemorable: £25 for a glossy, crispy, medium-rare fillet of duck laid across white rice with a bit of cucumber, and tofu noodles that could really have done with more oomph, heat and spark”, she laments. “The whopping great chilli king prawns, on the other hand, were possibly the highlight of the meal: fiery as heck, and in a fragrant pool of bright red, tamarind-heavy sauce.” Read the full review.