The largest single barrier to cooking Chinese, Thai, and Korean food well at home isn’t technique — it’s the pantry. Most American kitchens have soy sauce and call it a day. Cooking the recipes you actually want to make (kung pao chicken, mapo tofu, chow mein, Thai basil chicken, bibimbap) requires a longer list of staples, none of which are individually expensive but which collectively look intimidating to a beginner.
The good news: about 10 ingredients cover 90% of the recipes in The Wok by Kenji López-Alt and basically every wok cookbook in print. Most are shelf-stable for a year or longer. The total starter haul runs around $80 — less than two takeout dinners — and lasts most home cooks 6+ months.
Below is the canonical list, with our brand pick for each. Skip to the starter pack at the bottom if you want the short version.
Light soy sauce is the workhorse — the salty, savory backbone of almost every stir-fry sauce. It’s thinner, saltier, and lighter in color than the dark variety, and it’s what you mean when a Chinese recipe just says “soy sauce.”
Brand pick: Pearl River Bridge Superior Light Soy Sauce. One of the most respected light soy brands among Chinese cooks; clean, balanced, not over-fermented. Available in plastic bottles at a price that makes it the everyday default.
Substitutions: Kikkoman regular soy sauce is the most common American supermarket alternative — it’ll work, but it’s slightly sweeter and less assertive. Tamari is gluten-free and similar in flavor profile but more concentrated; use ¾ the volume.
Dark soy is the second non-negotiable. Aged longer than light soy and thickened with molasses or caramel, it’s what gives Cantonese chow mein its deep mahogany color and gives braised dishes their glossy lacquer. It is not interchangeable with light soy — using one in place of the other will either make your dish too salty (substituting light for dark) or too pale and flat (substituting dark for light).
Brand pick: Pearl River Bridge Dark Soy Sauce. Same brand as the light soy above. The combo is the standard pantry setup of basically every Chinese home cook.
Substitutions: None that really work. If you can only have one soy sauce, get light; dark soy is specifically for color and depth.
Shaoxing rice wine is the aromatic alcohol in most Chinese stir-fry sauces. It contributes complex umami, a faint sweetness, and a depth that pure rice vinegar can’t replicate. It’s used in everything from kung pao chicken marinade to mapo tofu sauce.
Brand pick: Soeos Shaoxing Cooking Wine. The most consistently available brand on Amazon; flavor is in the right neighborhood of authentic Shaoxing from a Chinese grocery.
Substitutions: Dry sherry is the classic English-language substitute (the alcohol profile is similar). Dry white wine works in a pinch. Do not use mirin (Japanese, sweeter, different application) or sake (different flavor and lacks the aged complexity).
Toasted sesame oil is a finishing oil, not a cooking oil. It’s added at the end of a stir-fry — off the heat — as a flavor accent. A teaspoon at the end of a dish does more than half a cup would do mid-cook. Its smoke point is too low to use for searing.
Brand pick: Kadoya Pure Sesame Oil. This is the brand. Japanese, properly toasted (smell it on the spoon — should be nutty and pronounced), perfect color. Restaurants use it; serious home cooks use it. The supermarket alternatives (Lee Kum Kee, generic store brands) are markedly less aromatic.
Substitutions: None. If you don’t have toasted sesame oil, just skip it — substituting plain sesame oil or peanut oil gives a fundamentally different result.
Oyster sauce is salty, sweet, viscous, and deeply umami — the all-purpose finisher for beef and broccoli, lo mein, stir-fried greens, and almost any Cantonese-style sauce. It contains actual oyster extract, which is what gives it the unmistakable savory depth no vegetarian substitute fully replicates.
Brand pick: Lee Kum Kee Premium Oyster Flavored Sauce. The legitimate version. Lee Kum Kee also makes a cheaper “Panda” line that’s lower-quality — make sure you’re getting the gold-label Premium.
Substitutions: Vegetarian “mushroom-flavored oyster sauce” (often labeled “vegetarian stir-fry sauce” at Asian grocers) is the closest plant-based alternative. Hoisin sauce is sometimes substituted in American recipes but it’s noticeably sweeter and doesn’t carry the same umami punch.
Fish sauce is to Southeast Asian cooking what light soy is to Chinese cooking — the salty backbone. Used in Thai stir-fries, Vietnamese marinades, dipping sauces, Filipino dishes. Made from fermented anchovies and salt.
Brand pick: Red Boat 40°N. The premium reference brand — only two ingredients (anchovies and salt), 40°N protein content (the highest you’ll find), made in Vietnam. Expensive ($10–15 per 17 oz bottle) but lasts for months even with regular use.
Substitutions: Squid Brand or Three Crabs Brand are the budget-friendly Thai alternatives — both decent. Vegan fish sauce (made from seaweed and mushrooms) exists but is a meaningfully different ingredient.
Doubanjiang (sometimes anglicized as “toban djan” or “Sichuan chili bean paste”) is the soul of Sichuan cooking. A deep reddish-brown paste of fermented broad beans and red chiles, sometimes aged for years. It’s what makes mapo tofu mapo tofu — without it, you have spicy braised tofu, not the dish.
Brand pick: NPG Premium Pixian Doubanjiang. Pixian is the region in Sichuan that produces the canonical version; this brand is faithful to the style. Authentic, intense, properly aged.
Substitutions: Lee Kum Kee’s “Chili Bean Sauce” is widely available in American supermarkets and acceptable but milder and less complex. Do not substitute Korean gochujang — different fermentation, different sweetness, different application.
Not actually pepper. Sichuan peppercorns are the dried husks of the prickly ash plant, and they produce a tingling, slightly numbing sensation called má that’s the signature of Sichuan cuisine alongside the chile heat (là). The pair together is má là — “numbing-spicy” — and it’s the defining flavor of mapo tofu, kung pao chicken, dan dan noodles, and dozens of other Sichuan dishes.
Brand pick: Soeos Sichuan Peppercorns 8 oz. Whole husks (avoid pre-ground — loses aroma fast), low-seed content (seeds add bitterness without adding flavor).
Substitutions: None functional. The numbing sensation is unique to Sichuan peppercorns and can’t be approximated. If you don’t have them, the dish will be flat by comparison.
White pepper is the same plant as black pepper, but processed differently — the outer husk is removed, leaving a milder, slightly fermented-tasting spice. It’s the pepper you want in Chinese soups, Cantonese stir-fries, marinades, and dim sum filling. Black pepper feels American-Western in Chinese contexts; white pepper feels right.
Brand pick: Badia Ground White Pepper. Widely available, properly milled, affordable. Pre-ground is fine for white pepper (less aromatic loss than black pepper).
Substitutions: Black pepper. The flavor will be different but recognizable. Get white pepper when you can.
The bad reputation MSG has in the West is unscientific (no controlled study has reproduced “Chinese restaurant syndrome” — the 1968 letter that started the myth was never peer-reviewed). MSG is just glutamic acid bound to sodium, the same amino acid that gives Parmesan, soy sauce, mushrooms, and tomatoes their savory depth. Restaurants use it. Most processed foods contain it. You should too.
Brand pick: Ajinomoto Umami Seasoning. The original — Ajinomoto invented the manufacturing process for purified MSG in 1908. Pure, consistent crystal size, dissolves cleanly.
Substitutions: Mushroom powder, kombu, dried shrimp, fish sauce, or nutritional yeast all add glutamates and can stand in for MSG’s role. But MSG itself is the clean, direct, cheap way to add umami without adding other flavors.
A few honorable mentions that fall just outside the top 10 but are worth having for specific cuisines:
If $80 across 10 items is too much for an opening salvo, here’s the must-have starter pack — six ingredients that get you through most everyday wok recipes:
With those six, you can make our kung pao chicken, Cantonese soy sauce chow mein, stir-fried broccoli, beef chow fun, buttered lo mein, and a half-dozen other recipes without missing key flavors. Add fish sauce, doubanjiang, Sichuan peppercorns, and MSG as you branch into Thai food and Sichuan cuisine.
Most of these last a long time, but a few caveats:
Once you have the pantry, the easiest first cooks are our stir-fried broccoli (uses just garlic, ginger, light soy, sugar) and Cantonese soy sauce chow mein (uses both soys, sesame oil, Shaoxing, white pepper). Both are sub-15-minute meals once you’ve got the pantry built.
The full canonical reference is The Wok by Kenji López-Alt — every recipe in the book uses these ingredients, and the book has a detailed pantry chapter that goes much deeper than this post.
This is just one of more than 200 recipes and techniques in The Wok: Recipes and Techniques by J. Kenji López-Alt — the James Beard Award–winning guide to wok cooking, from stir-fries and deep-fries to steaming, smoking, and braising. 600+ pages of science-backed technique and authentic recipes.
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