To alleviate the grind of lockdown cooking, we are raiding the global larder way beyond ketchup and brown sauce, to unlock a world of hot, concentrated, punchy flavours with the ability to transform a meal in seconds. These “cooked mushrooms doused in fearsomely hot chilli oil and Sichuan pepper” will, promises Nicola Lando, the owner of Sous Chef, banish “food boredom”. But, says James Chant, the owner of the ramen-kit makers Matsudai in Cardiff: “It’s also phenomenal on chips and eggs, or in butter to finish seafood or chicken. In Ghana, most people use it like a table sauce or a salsa for fish,” says Adejoké Bakare of this west African answer to XO, flavoured with dried and fermented fish or fried meat.

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Bakare’s Brixton restaurant, Chishuru, makes its own shito, but the Ghana Best brand is available at Tesco and Asda. Specialist retailers report booming sales, with the importer MexGrocer shifting double its usual amount of Valentina hot sauce last year. at Selfridges) and designer packaging, this black truffle-infused hot sauce sounds ludicrously bling. Yin eats sambal with eggs, noodles and soups, stirs it into pasta sauces or combines it with mayo on a jacket potato. Popular in Francophone west Africa, this spicily seasoned sauce, based around caramelised onion, lemon and mustard, is often used to marinade meat, then cooked while you grill that chicken or fish.But, observes Alex Rushmer, the chef-owner at Vanderlyle in Cambridge, they also add “zip to carrots and other root vegetables”. In Romania, this simple garlic dressing – five cloves crushed with one teaspoon of salt in 100ml of water – is, says Irina Georgescu, the author of Carpathia, “drizzled on polenta, roasted vegetables, fried fish or added to meatballs. In Malaysia, sambal is an ingredient and condiment on every table, every meal time,” says Mandy Yin, the owner of Sambal Shiok Laksa Bar in London, which sells its own sambals. She uses the mamba (sometimes known as manba or mambá) in the west African stew maafe and as a topping on porridge.

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My favourite is pouring sriracha into chicken noodle soup with loads of coriander, roasted sesame oil and spring onion.Vibrant heat and big flavours are constants, but ingredients can range from as little as chillies, salt and vinegar or lime, in the basic sambal oelek, to mango, tamarind, shrimp paste or smoked fish (most Asian supermarkets carry several examples). From burger topping and fruit dip to east Asian noodle dressings, the world uses peanut butter in many ways beyond spreading it on toast. Huge in China, Lao Gan Man’s crispy chilli oils also have a passionate following among western food geeks. The original fried onion and Guizhou chilli oil is the cult classic (warm heat, incredible savoury depth), but the black bean version (“God tier!

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Caramelised onions with grilled meat is another level,” says Bakare, who energises Chishuru’s yassa with Cameroonian white penja pepper. He adds black bean LGM to everything from crab linguine to chicken sandwiches and wants to use it in a dessert: “That savouriness would work well with chocolate.It’s cracking on stir-fried veg or anything that needs a savoury, salty kick,” says Patel of this 19th-century Swiss-German creation. This exhilarating Yemeni green chilli and garlic sauce, verdant with parsley and coriander, lifts any salad, sabich (roasted aubergine) or falafel pitta.