Indo-Chinese at Home: Building a Sauce Shelf Beginners Actually Use

Walk down the sauces aisle and it's easy to end up with five bottles you'll use once. If you're starting an Indo-Chinese shelf from scratch, you don't need all of them at once — a small, well-chosen set covers almost everything a home cook makes regularly.

The starter five

• Soya Sauce — the salt-and-colour base almost every stir-fry or fried rice starts with
• Schezwan Sauce — for heat and depth, stirred in near the end of cooking
• Green Chilli Sauce — a sharper, cleaner heat that works well in dips and marinades
• Tomato Ketchup — sweetness and body, used in far more Indo-Chinese cooking than people expect
• Synthetic Vinegar — the acidity that ties a dish together, especially in fried rice and Manchurian gravies

A simple rule for balancing them

Most Indo-Chinese gravies and stir-fries are built on the same three-part balance: salt (soya sauce), heat (schezwan or green chilli), and a touch of sweet-sour (ketchup and vinegar together). Once you've got that ratio in your head, you can improvise most dishes without a recipe in front of you.

Keep quantities small when you're starting out — a teaspoon of each per serving is a reasonable base — and taste as you go rather than following measurements exactly. Every stove runs a little differently, and sauces reduce and intensify at different rates depending on how hot your pan is.