Katie Sanderson, Condiments
WHITE MAUSU
Dublin, Ireland
Having spent the majority of her childhood in Hong Kong (before moving to Ireland), it’s perhaps unsurprising that Katie found herself gravitating towards the flavours of Asia in her 20s. It was while working in a cafe in Dublin that she started experimenting with rayu (chilli oil), bulking it out with the like of peanuts, and started selling unlabelled jars of the stuff on markets to test the waters. The condiment family soon extended with spicy black bean rayu and sweet and salty cashew crunch, all of which are equally good served with noodles and homemade dumplings as they are dolloped over eggs or vegetables. White Mausu, founder Katie says, is a “real mash up” of the bold flavours of Korea and China, and the more delicate ones of Japan. The result? Condiments that are the very definition of a store-cupboard ingredient that has the power to elevate even the simplest dishes.
”I was born and grew up in Hong Kong, then moved to Ireland when I was about 11 years old. We ate a lot of dumplings and fried rice, but we weren’t authentically eating street food every other night; it was Irish home cooking counterbalanced with chopsticks. That’s the thing about White Mausu, it’s a mishmash of everything – I love Japanese design, I have this fascination with the big, bold flavours of Korea and China but also love the delicate Japanese flavours. I guess we’re not any one of those things, we’re playing with everything.
I was always really interested in food and cooking. I went off and did some catering, and somewhere in my 20s I just found myself gravitating back to all the flavours [of Asia]. I always liked the idea of restaurants and did some cool stages, but the full-on restaurant work really intimidated me, so I started to do pop-ups. I did that for a few years and that led me on to a fermentation path, which led to a seaweed episode. I’d get really into something like seaweed, then think, ‘Okay, I’m going to start a seaweed restaurant in a boat shed,’ do that for four months and then crush it all down and start something else. It was a way I could play with everything that was interesting and exciting me. I’d still scatter some corporate bits in-between, but mainly I was following my gut; if you make a niche for yourself, you end up being more creative.
It was getting to the stage where it wasn’t sustainable. I thought that if I wanted to continue with this work, I needed something running alongside that was my bread and butter, that enabled the other stuff and meant you can go off on that three-week research trip, or whatever. When looking back to the flavours of Asia, I was reminded of the chilli oils you’d always get on restaurant tables. I was working at a café at the time and so I started messing around with different chilli oils, bulking them out with peanuts and playing around with sweet and salty, and messing it up a bit. I ended up making a version of peanut rayu and people reacted really well to it – they wanted to take it home.
“Markets are such a good thing because you can test out your product, talk to people, build relations and you really realise if something is going to work or not
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Katie Sanderson
It led to me jarring it up and doing a few markets. There was this really brilliant monthly flea market in Dublin, which has since gone because the whole city has been taken over by skyscrapers, but it was such a good corner of the community. I have so many friends who started their businesses there, from knitters to bakers. It’s such a good thing because you can test out your product, talk to people, build relations, and you really realise if something is going to work or not. It gives you that opportunity to grow little by little, especially if you don’t have the funds to start in a big way.
For the first market I did, I just had a table of peanut rayu with no labels, so no one knew what it was. It was actually a good thing because it was then purely about the taste. If you know these sauces well or eat a lot of Asian food, it’s not such a big surprise, but a lot of people haven’t been to the Asian supermarkets here in Dublin, even though they live here. It was letting people know that you can put it on your noodles and dumplings, but it’s also really good on eggs or steamed broccoli – widening what you can use it for.
We started with the peanut rayu and then I’d do specials for different markets; I’d make pickled shiitake, Thai sweet chilli sauce, kimchi… that mismatch of having a bit of Korean influence, then Chinese. After a year, I thought I’d make it a bit more serious and my partner, Jasper, came on board and from there we tried to get it into shops.
Somewhere in all of this I started doing festivals. I was infatuated with the idea of doing one thing and doing it really well. There was this dish that we used to make for staff when we were doing projects: A big bowl of rice, peas, pickles, kimchi, miso aubergines, loads of peanut rayu, a fried egg and greens on top – a mix between a Japanese donburi and a Korean bibimbap. We went to the festivals and just did this one bowl, and you could get it with an egg or tofu. It was such a cool way to get people interested.
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The thing about White Mausu is that it’s a mishmash of everything – I grew up in Hong Kong, I have this fascination with the big, bold flavours of Korea and China, but also love the delicate Japanese flavours.
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Now we’re making around 12,000 jars a month and it has become a full-time job for five people. We’re finally at a stage where we feel a lot more in control of the business and the choices we make. For pop-ups or projects I've done in the past, we were using more local ingredients and I knew the name of every supplier. My ideal would be that we have that with our chilli oils. We are sourcing organic and Fairtrade ingredients, like our tamari and some of our seeds, but to get straight from the peanut farms or factories would be amazing.
Peanut rayu will always be our staple and we bring others in and out. Our cashew crunch started off life as a walnut miso. It was inspired by a trip to Koya in London, where I had this beautiful bowl of noodles with walnut miso paste on top. I started playing around with a chunkier version of that, adding different bits and bobs and seeing how it reacted, putting some sweetness in there. Then when it came to making new products, we thought that maybe cashews were a bit more of a rounded nut, and so that’s our non-spicy version. The black bean rayu is my favourite. Jasper was playing around with that one; it has big, banging black beans, you can taste a bit of Sichuan peppercorns, star anise… It’s definitely a lot spicier and I like that.
One of the most amazing things I’ve been doing with the black bean rayu is mixing it with peanut butter then frying some rice, an egg and some peas or whatever, and adding in that black bean/peanut butter mixture. The other thing you can do is make a really plain broth (ginger and spring onion) and use that to flavour it, then throw in some noodles and homemade dumplings. Even though I cook a lot of Asian-inspired food at home, just frying some kale and putting a tiny bit of rayu on top – or with carrots – works really well.
As we grow and take people on, it’s about what kind of company you want to run. I read a really good quote, which was, “businesses can and should be a force for good,” and that really got me thinking about where we can make positive change. How can we source better and have a really good company that’s doing good things in Ireland for food and also a really enjoyable place to work?”
For more, visit whitemausu.com
Photographs: White Mausu
@whitemausu