This dish is definitely not for the faint-hearted people as it is rather heavily spiced with ingredients  chillies, both dried and fresh, sze chuan peppercorns, five spice powder and so on. If you are a spicy food lover, this dish is probably the most wonderful dish that humans have ever created!

To say that, it does not necessarily mean that you can only taste the chilli in the Mala Hot Pot. In fact, it really flavourful and savoury, depending on the raw ingredients that you add into it. All of the Mala Xiang Guo shops follow the Yong Tau Foo style, where you pick the raw ingredients that you want to add into the sauce.

The extra part will be that after you have done picking the ingredients, you have to choose the level of spiciness that you want be it, mild, medium, high, or ultimate. As a beginner, you might want to start with mild. For those who are an avid spicy food eater, medium is a great place to begin with. 

I have once tried the ultimate level of spiciness at one of the Mala Xiang Guo shop called the Xiang La La. Although I was enjoying myself with the food at that moment, the aftermath was pretty gory. I had a extremely bad stomachache at the end of the day and diarrhoea the next day. It took me couple of days to recover. but to be honest I have #noregrets.

So when I came back to my hometown, I was craving for the Mala Xiang Guo dish at an epic scale because there is no MLXG shop here. Good riddance I have managed to buy get a pack of MaLa 

sauce before I returned! So the Ma La Xiang Guo Basic Stir Fry Sauce is by the Hai Di Lao company. 

When I bought it, the sauce was on offer at a price of SGD$3.95 instead of usual SGD$4.50. After a rough conversion, it was about MYR 12 which I thought was a little bit pricy considering that it was only sauce. Nevertheless, it is a really worth it buy because you can put a lot of ingredients based on your preference and cook a whole wok of it and consume them for about 10 meals.

That saves you a load of money from spending in the mala restaurant or stalls (more than MYR300 because each time I spend about RM30 each time I dine in)!Upon opening the packaging you will find 2 packs of 110g of sauce. Mind you, the sauce itself is already oily so you should not put too much oil in the wok.

How to cook it?

The way I go about it is kind of simple. After browsing through other websites on how to cook it, I customised it in a way so that it fits my taste.

Viola, that's it. It is best served with white rice and a jug of icy chilled water. Let me know if you have better way to cook the dish in the comments below so that it will be way more delicious. Till then, bye.