The Chinese Ingredients People Search for a Substitute For

The ingredients people most often need to replace

We took the 2,000 search queries that showed Chowmi most often on Google over four weeks and kept the 429 that asked for a substitute, an alternative or a replacement. Each one was matched to the ingredient it named, whatever the spelling or language. The table shows each ingredient's share of those searches, and how many different ways people typed the request.

Two fresh vegetables sit in the top three. That says something about where the gap is: jarred sauces can be ordered online, but gai lan and bok choy have to be in the store that day.

• Doubanjiang substitutes
• Chinese broccoli substitutes
• Bok choy substitutes
• Black bean sauce substitutes
• Chili oil substitutes

One comparison dominates: doubanjiang vs gochujang

Eighty of the 2,000 queries were comparisons: “X vs Y,” “is X the same as Y,” “difference between X and Y.” More than half of that search activity was a single pair. People holding a tub of Korean gochujang want to know whether it can stand in for Sichuan doubanjiang. The two look alike and taste different: gochujang is sweet and smooth, doubanjiang is salty, chunky and fermented with broad beans.

The second pair is about wrappers, not sauces: gyoza and wonton wrappers sit side by side in the same cooler.

Chinese name or English name? It depends on the ingredient

Most Chinese ingredients have at least two names in English-language cooking: a translation and a romanized Chinese name. Which one people type is not consistent. For vegetables and cured meat, about three in four searches use the English description. For doubanjiang it's the reverse: more than nine in ten use the Mandarin name, and the English translations barely register.

For anyone writing recipes, the practical reading is to lead with the name people use and put the other in brackets: “Chinese broccoli (gai lan)” but “doubanjiang (chili bean paste).”

How people phrase it: “substitute,” typed as a label

“Substitute” is the word by a wide margin, and the usual form is the ingredient followed by that one word: “rock sugar substitute.” About one search in five turns it around (“substitute for rock sugar”). Full questions such as “what can I use instead of rock sugar” are rare in typed search, under 1%.

Spelling splits along national lines. “Chilli,” the British and Australian spelling, appears in about a quarter of searches for chili oil, chili crisp and related sauces. “Chile” is rare.

Method and limits

The source is Google Search Console for chowmi.com: the 2,000 queries with the most impressions from October 12 to November 8, 2026, from all countries. An impression is one appearance of a Chowmi page in someone's search results. We sorted queries into groups with fixed text rules (for example, a query counts as a substitute search if it contains “substitute,” “alternative,” “replacement,” “replace,” “instead of,” “sub for” or “swap”), then matched each to an ingredient by its names and spellings. Queries we couldn't match to a single ingredient were 2.4% of substitute-search impressions and are left out of the ingredient table.

These are the limits that matter. First, this is one site's view of search. An ingredient ranks in the table only if Chowmi appeared for it; the 14 listed ingredients averaged positions 3 to 11 in results. Ingredients where larger sites fill the first page, such as Shaoxing wine, oyster sauce and hoisin sauce, are undercounted or missing, so read the table as “most searched among less-covered ingredients,” not as a ranking of all Chinese ingredients. Second, impressions are not people: one person searching three times counts three times. Third, four weeks in autumn is a snapshot; shares for seasonal ingredients will move.

We publish shares and the number of distinct phrasings, not raw totals. Name and spelling shares are given only where the ingredient had enough searches for the split to be stable. The shares of wording, spelling and names depend much less on where Chowmi ranks than the ingredient ranking does, and are the sturdier findings.

The Chinese Ingredients People Search for a Substitute For FAQ