When I started working in food media, my then boyfriend Michael invented an imaginary competitor to my employers called Mike’s Food News, which quickly became a recurring bit.
Eating mediocre fast food, he would say, “Too bad you can’t write about this, Mike’s Food News has the exclusive.” If he freestyled something particularly weird for dinner, that was Mike’s Food News recipe testing. MFN was always working on something too niche or too wild for wherever I was on staff. So when Michael announced there was a mapo chili mac feature in the works at the publication that only existed in his brain, it took a while for me to realize he’d dreamed up a recipe that deserved space in the real world too.
Mapo chili mac is exactly what it sounds like: a hybridization of two noted comfort foods, mapo tofu (silken tofu and ground pork in a tingly Sichuan peppercorn–laced sauce) and chili mac (elbow macaroni tossed with meaty chili, topped with cheese). That the idea to combine these dishes came to Michael is not surprising; it is, in many ways, the culinary embodiment of him—part Chinese, part Midwestern, spicy, and anchored by a lot of dairy.
Though it started as part of an extended riff on cultural mash-ups that would appear in the pages of Mike’s Food News, mapo chili mac quickly morphed into an earnest idea, something Michael A) desperately wanted to eat, and B) felt had a place in the current food world landscape. When recipes popped up featuring Chinese flavors applied to pasta—see Diana Yen’s Dan Dan Pappardelle—he would point indignantly at the screen. “Do you see this?!” he would ask (I had. I’d showed it to him in the first place). “The people are begging for mapo chili mac!”
Soon the phrase took on its own meaning in our home. We said “mapo chili mac” all the time, as a placeholder for Michael’s many zany, unrealized schemes. For years I forgot that it wasn’t just a joke that could never live anywhere other than our collective imagination. Until one day, I said it in the test kitchen, and my coworkers’ faces lit up. Oh. Right. It was actually a good recipe idea, and the only person standing in the way of making it a reality was me.
So nearly 10 years after its first utterance by the guy I’d married in the interim, I went to work armed with a jar of doubanjiang, a few blocks of sharp yellow cheddar, and the pressure of delivering on a decade of build-up.
To make mapo chili mac, you start by building a spicy ground pork chili. Aromatics (like ginger and garlic) and ground Sichian peppercorns blitzed in a blender make up a flavorful base, while doubanjiang (fermented chile bean paste) adds funk and canned crushed tomatoes provide body. Folding in the pasta, butter, and a bunch of grated cheese creates a velvety texture, begging to be topped with scallions, more ground peppercorns, and even more cheese. It’s extremely good, so comforting, and comes together in one Dutch oven. It hits hard, like a lasagna, but with a building heat and rumbling funkiness.
Just now, while writing, I yelled across the apartment to ask Michael for a few of his own words on mapo chili mac. He answered by bringing me his copy of Hyperculture by culture and media theorist Byung-chul Han, his finger holding the slim book open to a passage: “The US is the source of not just McDonald’s but also of ‘fusion food’ or ‘fusion cuisine,’ an eclectic culinary approach that makes free use of all that the hypercultural pool of spices, ingredients, and ways of preparing food has to offer. This hypercuisine does not level the diversity of eating cultures. It does not just blindly throw everything into one pot. Rather, it thrives on the differences. This allows it to create a diversity that would not be possible on the basis of preserving the purity of local food cultures. Globalization and diversity are not mutually exclusive.”
“I’m not writing about fusion, really,” I told him, a topic about which much has been said where I work and elsewhere. I was teeing him up. Usually this is where he’d claim a story was too much for Bon Appétit and would have to find a home on Mike’s Food News.
Instead, he said, “Mapo chili mac is anti-authentic and that’s the point.” He turned to walk back down the hallway. “It’s an idea for doofuses. I wanted to be able to eat both my favorite foods at once, and now I can.”
