There’s a jar of five-spice powder in my kitchen that gets more action than most of my spice rack combined. It ended up there because of dumplings — specifically, because I kept ordering them at a place in San Francisco that had this incredible dipping sauce, and one day I decided I could figure it out at home.
Turns out it’s embarrassingly simple. Soy sauce, rice vinegar, chili oil, sesame oil, five-spice, and maybe a pinch of sugar if the heat needs taming. You whisk it all together, let it sit for a few minutes, and suddenly you have something that tastes like it came from a restaurant with a line out the door.
The five-spice does the heavy lifting here — star anise, cloves, cinnamon, Sichuan peppercorns, and fennel seeds all working together in a single teaspoon. It’s warm, it’s complex, it’s a little bit mysterious. And it turns a Tuesday-night dumpling situation into an event.
Makes: about ¼ cup • Time: 5 minutes