Having a chile paste on hand is having a shortcut to flavor. Some are all heat. Some are heat plus. Plus garlic, plus spices, plus sugar, plus fermented soy, plus fish…if anything could possibly be considered delicious, inventive societies have added chile to it and made it into a sauce.

Have you ever watched Gordon Ramsay mince an onion into perfect 2 mm cubes in 3 seconds flat? Or seed and dice a tomato so cleanly the tomato didn’t even see it coming? One minute it’s just sitting there and the next it’s laying in a million pieces like, “What the fuck just happened???”