A few weeks back, I was ordering lunch at a seafood joint in Alexandria, Virginia, when I spied a peculiarly named appetizer, “bang bang” shrimp. As a student of Chinese cooking, I recognized the name, so I gave it a try. What appeared several minutes later were deep-fried prawns tossed in a creamy mixture of garlic, ginger, ground chiles and mayonnaise. Sure, the name of this increasingly popular dish evokes an ode to explosive Asian heat, but no matter how delicious the snack may be, Chinese cooks would be confounded. Deep-fried? Mayonnaise? Spicy? Heck, in China, despite its fiery name, “bang bang” doesn’t even refer to flavor.

Bang bang chicken’s name derives from the noise of a baton smacking a whole cooked bird, breaking it into serving portions. Chicken busted up in such a fashion is indeed bang bang, with or without a dressing. Over the centuries, however, the name has come to mean the fully dressed masterpiece with a signature sauce.

Traditionally, the five flavors in Chinese cookery are salty, sour, sweet, spicy and bitter. Where a single meal should present a balance of these elements, it’s remarkable when a single sauce embraces all five, and in a humble street snack at that. Today, where most bang bang chicken vendors sell from name-brand stalls at morning markets, their history runs deep. Ingenious southwestern cooks during the Ming dynasty struck alchemy: simple poached chicken and a combination of soy sauce, sugar, vinegar, chile oil, Sichuan peppercorns and sesame paste. Virtually every modern bang bang vendor has a unique twist on the formula, yet the ingredients and overall effect remain.

When I began my China wandering in the 1990s, I enjoyed more than my fill of devilishly spicy Sichuan specialties. But the first time I tried a properly dressed bang bang chicken, my understanding of Sichuan cuisine moved from the idea of the stereotypical incendiary fare to the appreciation of it as a rich and complex cuisine. There is hardly another Chinese sauce that evokes such perfection: spicy but not burning, sweet but not cloying, bitter but not disarming, sour but not puckering, salty but not oceanic.

A decade later, while backpacking around Sichuan province, I found my way to Dave’s Oasis, a foreigner’s refuge in the heart of the capital, Chengdu. On an average day, well before fusion was a thing, the owner, Dave Fan, would whip up mapo tofu pizza, cheeseburger fried rice or my favorite, grilled bang bang chicken. Fan was born and raised in Chengdu, but grilling the meat could be seen as heretical in Chinese gastronomy, where preserving the character of an individual ingredient is sacrosanct and poaching or steaming chicken is the ultimate in preservation. Though examples abound of grilled snacks in the Chinese street food playbook, masking the flavor of expertly charred meat with more than a dry dusting of spice, or maybe chile oil, is well outside the norm. In the case of Fan’s bang bang chicken, genius. As he said, “Every cuisine has its strengths. We can learn a lot by teaming them up!”

I’m pretty sure Fan was just experimenting at the grill that day, but it left an indelible mark on my mind and my palate. Most of my barbecue slatherings from cookouts past sang a single note of sweet, sour or spicy with maybe a bit of overlap. Bang bang sauce changes the tune by bringing along bitter and salty for perfect harmony.

Howie Southworth is a freelance writer.