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Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy Sichuan Chili Sauce is not a chili crisp. The label says “chili sauce” and the jar delivers exactly that — a thick, syrupy, plum-forward sweet heat that lives closer to a dipping sauce than anything with meaningful crunch. Clean ingredient list. Distinctive flavor. Worth having if sweet heat is your thing. Tier: GOOD (as chili sauce — evaluated accordingly, not against chili crisp criteria).
Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy Chili Sauce Review: Read the Label Before You’re Disappointed
This is the second Fly By Jing product I’ve reviewed, and I’m going to do you a favor I didn’t do for myself: read the label before you go in expecting chili crisp.
Fly By Jing calls this a Sichuan Chili Sauce. Not chili crisp. Not chili oil. Sauce. I caught that about halfway through my tasting, which explains some of my initial disappointment and most of my course correction. This one’s on me — I bought the 4-pack, assumed everything in it was chili crisp, and didn’t bother to read the label the first time around. Evaluated as a chili sauce — which is what it actually is — this Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy review is a different conversation entirely.
Same label design as the Fly By Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp, same 6 oz jar, part of the same 4-pack Amazon variety ($34.99) that includes the Original, this, the Extra Crunchy, and the Extra Spicy. Woman-owned, Asian-owned, vegan. Notably not sugar-free — the Original is. Refrigerate after opening. Stir well before use.
This product is labeled Sichuan Chili Sauce, not Sichuan Chili Crisp. I’m evaluating it as a chili sauce. It came in a box with three chili crisps, the branding looks identical, and I assumed it was part of the same lineup — but the label is clear. If you’re shopping the Fly By Jing range expecting four chili crisps, you’re getting three and a sauce.
Quick Facts
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Brand | Fly By Jing |
| Product | Sweet and Spicy Sichuan Chili Sauce |
| Category | Chili Sauce |
| Style | Sichuan / Chinese |
| Oil | Soybean |
| Heat | 3 / 5 |
| Price | $8.75 (as part of 4-pack, $34.99) |
| Size | 6 oz |
| Per oz | $1.46/oz |
| Made in | China |
| Buy | Amazon (4-pack variety), flybyjing.com |
| Tier | GOOD |
The Label
Ingredients in order: soybean oil, soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, dried chili pepper, black vinegar, sesame oil, mushroom powder, spices.
Short, clean list. Soybean oil leads — the Original uses rapeseed oil, and there’s a real difference in how those feel. Soybean is neutral and affordable. Rapeseed has more personality. This one goes neutral.
The black vinegar entry is worth unpacking. The label lists its own sub-ingredients: water, rice, wheat, sorghum, corn, buckwheat, salt, sugar. That’s a serious vinegar — Shanxi-style, the kind that carries deep fermented character. Brown sugar and soy sauce are both early in the list. So the formula here is clear from the jump: they’re going for sweet, savory, tangy, with chili peppers and Sichuan peppercorn as the heat layer on top.
This is built like a dipping sauce, ingredient by ingredient.
No MSG listed. The umami is coming from the soy sauce, mushroom powder, and the fermented depth of the black vinegar. That’s a more “clean label” approach than the Original — which is fine. Different tool. Worth noting: this product contains wheat (in the black vinegar), so it’s not gluten-free despite being vegan.
Appearance
The settlement ratio runs more than half solids by volume, but less than two-thirds — Acceptable on the five-level scale, though the character of those solids is what matters here. Nothing is crispy. The bits clump. The sugar and vinegar have basically syrup-coated everything in the jar, and what you get is a thick, goopy mass at the bottom that sticks together rather than dispersing. Even after stirring, it doesn’t get fully homogeneous.
The color is deep. Dark mahogany, bordering on black in places. The kind of color that reads as “this will stain everything it touches,” which it will.
The fork sinks straight to the bottom — same as the Original — but when I tilted the fork vertical, the product didn’t slide off. It held. That’s the sugar doing its thing. It just looks like it’d be sweet before you ever taste it.
Aroma
On opening, the smell doesn’t hit you the way the Original does. That jar has a warm, roasted-garlic-and-chili pop when the lid comes off. This one is quieter — deeper, richer, sweeter. You get that fermented brown-sugar sweetness, almost molasses-adjacent. It smells like something that belongs on ribs, not rice. That’s not an insult. It’s just telling you what you’re holding before you even taste it.
Texture
This is the biggest departure from anything in the chili crisp category, and once I remembered I wasn’t evaluating chili crisp, it stopped being a problem.
The bits don’t crunch. There are no individual crispy pieces. Everything is coated and clumped — the sugar and vinegar have done their work, and the solids have bonded into something with more of a thick, jammy texture than a snap or bite. You can still feel the chili pieces and the garlic; they’re just not crunchy. This is fully by design. Chili sauce doesn’t need to crunch. It needs to coat.
Fork to mouth, it’s sticky and thick. Not unpleasantly so — it’s a syrupy condiment, and it behaves like one. Won’t drip off your food and disappear into the bottom of a bowl. It’ll hold where you put it.
Flavor
This is where the product delivers.
The first hit is sweet — a deep, dark sweetness from the brown sugar and soy sauce that’s immediately followed by something fruity. Almost plum-like. I’d guess that comes from the black vinegar interacting with the sugar and heat during processing — those fermented esters can do interesting things. There’s a light fruitiness that reads as stone fruit rather than citrus. Somewhere between plum sauce and a very good barbecue base.
Then the Sichuan peppercorn arrives. Numbing tingle on the lips, then a clean heat from the chili peppers that builds but doesn’t escalate past a comfortable medium. It doesn’t linger long.
What you get in total: sweet → fruity → numbing tingle → chili heat → savory finish from the soy and vinegar. That sequence is deliberate and it works. This isn’t a one-note sweetness dumped on top of chili. The black vinegar provides tanginess that keeps it from reading as candy. The mushroom powder adds depth underneath everything without announcing itself.
The oil on its own — which I tested separately — is good. Clean. Doesn’t sit on the palate or feel greasy. Fly By Jing is consistent in this across their range: whatever you think of the solids, the oil itself is well-made. That whole-jar approach I noted in the Original review carries over here — the oil, the sugar base, and the seasonings all feel like they were designed together.
Heat
Medium. The Sichuan peppercorn gives it the tingly numbness first, followed by a clean chili burn that tops out around a 3. It arrives with the sweetness rather than after it — they’re essentially simultaneous — which makes the heat feel like part of the flavor rather than a separate event. Nothing lingers past the meal. Heat-cautious eaters will be fine. This Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy sauce is genuinely sweet-and-spicy, not “sweet with a hint of warmth.”
Use Cases
This isn’t a “put it on everything” sauce. The sweetness is specific enough that you’ll want to pair it with foods that benefit from a sweet-heat glaze rather than a savory-heat punch.
Good fits: Dumplings. Fried pork. Chicken wings — this would be genuinely excellent on chicken wings. Fried rice. Anything that would welcome a teriyaki-adjacent treatment but wants some chili character underneath.
Where it falls flat: Eggs. Plain rice. Noodles that already have a savory base. The sweetness competes rather than complements in those contexts. This is not the jar you reach for when you want to deepen the savory register of a dish.
My wife prefers this style — sweet-heat over straight savory — so this one stays in the rotation as-is. It doesn’t need help and it doesn’t need mixing. It’s its own thing.
Unlike the Original, this isn’t a strong mixing candidate. The sweetness is distinctive enough that blending it into another jar would just make that jar sweeter — which is usually not what I’m looking for. That said, if I wanted to build something interesting: pair this with a crunchy garlic crisp that’s heavy on the fried bits and light on its own flavor. You’d get the sweet, tangy heat from this and the crunch and savory from the crisp. Worth trying if you have both in the fridge. But this is a standalone jar for most people.
Packaging and Value
$8.75/jar is what you pay when you buy the 4-pack variety ($34.99). The Original sells standalone for $15–22 for the same 6 oz. If you’re already interested in more than one Fly By Jing product, the Sample Pack comparison is the obvious move. At $1.46/oz, you’re paying less than Lao Gan Ma’s per-ounce rate on the small jar, which is solid for a product with this ingredient quality.
Final Verdict
The category call is the whole story here. Evaluated as a chili crisp, this would disappoint — no crunch, high sweetness, no individual bits. Evaluated as a chili sauce, which is what the label says it is, it’s a clean, thoughtfully built condiment with a distinctive flavor profile and real versatility within its lane.
GOOD at Flavor Index Lab means: solid product, worth buying, does what it does and does it honestly. The clean ingredient list, the real black vinegar, the flavor sequence that actually develops — this earns the tier. It’s not the jar you reach for in every situation, but when the moment calls for a sweet-heat dipping sauce with some Sichuan character, this one delivers.
Biggest strength: The flavor sequence — sweet to fruity to tingly to heat to savory. It’s deliberate and it develops. The black vinegar does real work.
Biggest weakness: Limited use-case range. The sweetness narrows where this works. It’s not a universal condiment.
Would I buy it again? Yes — my wife uses it regularly. As a household condiment, it’s earned its fridge spot.
Is Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy the same as chili crisp?
No. Fly By Jing labels this a Sichuan Chili Sauce, not chili crisp. The texture is thick and syrupy — the solids are coated with sugar and black vinegar rather than fried crispy. If you’re looking for crunch and savory heat, reach for the Fly By Jing Sichuan Chili Crisp instead.
What does Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy taste like?
Deep brown-sugar sweetness with a plum-fruit quality, followed by Sichuan peppercorn tingle and a clean medium-heat chili burn. The black vinegar keeps it from being cloying — there’s real tang underneath the sweetness. Think sweet-heat barbecue with a Sichuan accent.
Is Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy vegan?
Yes. Ingredients are all plant-based: soybean oil, soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, dried chili pepper, black vinegar, sesame oil, mushroom powder, and spices. No honey, no animal products.
Does Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy need to be refrigerated?
Yes — the label specifies refrigeration after opening. The black vinegar and soy sauce in the formula benefit from cold storage once you’ve broken the seal.
What’s the difference between Fly By Jing Original and Sweet and Spicy?
The Original (Sichuan Chili Crisp) uses rapeseed oil, fermented black beans, and MSG to build a savory, layered heat. The Sweet and Spicy is built around soybean oil, brown sugar, soy sauce, and black vinegar — it’s sweeter, thicker, and closer to a dipping sauce than a crisp. Different tools for different jobs.
What is Fly By Jing Sweet and Spicy good on?
Best on dumplings, fried chicken, chicken wings, and fried rice. The sweet-heat profile works anywhere you’d use a sweet glaze with chili character. Less suited for eggs, plain rice, or dishes with a savory base where the sweetness competes.