White Mausu

We’re two cooks – Katie and Jasper – who love making food that makes people happy. Between us, we’ve spent 30 years messing with recipes, burning things and bunging way too much chilli into stuff until we got it just right. We met working in a Dublin café. One day, the café owner Aisling brought us in a concoction made by a Japanese lady she knew – a delightful rāyu that reminded me of the banging chilli oils I’d grown up with in Hong Kong. I was buzzing. My one great love is sauces, condiments or whatever you want to call something that creates a flavour explosion. I was inspired to experiment with combinations to add to my travelling larder. At the time, I was what you might call a ‘nomadic’ chef, doing pop-ups, retreats, and getting inspired by everything from fermentation to seaweed. For two incredible summers, me and Jasper teamed up to turn a boatshed on Ireland’s West Coast into a seaweed restaurant, using the donkey stable as our kitchen! You couldn’t beat the sea views from our chopping boards. Jasper built a homemade tandoor and cooked freshly caught fish straight from the boats. Truly dreamy stuff! All the while, we would be sneaking our chilli oils into staff meals, and giving people jars of the stuff as presents. Everyone who tried it was hooked. We had people telling us they’d give us the coat off their back for some to take home! So it felt like the natural next step to rent a stall at the Dublin Flea Market and try selling it. Without a name. Or labels. But with a ballsy belief in how versatile our rāyu was. And before we knew it, we had customers, and a company!