Unlike sweet bean sauce, yellow soybean paste is salty rather than sweet.

Sweet bean sauce is sweeter than yellow soybean paste, which is saltier.

Sweet bean sauce can be found in typical Asian supermarkets under various English names, but with a common Chinese name (甜麵醬).

The meat is eaten with scallion, cucumber and sweet bean sauce with pancakes rolled around the fillings.

The remaining fat, meat and bones may be made into a broth, served as is, or the meat chopped up and stir fried with sweet bean sauce.

"炸肥肠-Zha Fei Chang," deep fried pork intestine slices and dipped in a sweet bean sauce is commonly offered by street hawkers.

We helped ourselves by smearing a paper-thin Mandarin pancake with a generous dollop of sweet bean sauce, adding scallions, cucumber and pieces of duck.

Both Peking duck and moo shu pork are rolled up in thin wheat flour bao bing with scallions and sweet bean sauce or hoisin sauce.

Some sauces in Chinese cuisine are soy sauce, doubanjiang, hoisin sauce, sweet bean sauce, chili sauces, oyster sauce, and sweet and sour sauce.

Yellow soybean paste is used most notably in the noodle dish called zhajiang mian, although outside Beijing, sweet bean sauce or hoisin sauce is often used as a substitute.

Next to the duck are several dishes, one piled with scallion slivers, a second with hoisin sauce, tianmianjiang (a sweet sauce made of fermented flour) or a sweet bean sauce.

It is prized for the thin, crispy skin, with authentic versions of the dish serving mostly the skin and little meat, and eaten with pancakes, scallions, and hoisin sauce or sweet bean sauce.

Essential accompaniments are a spicy, vinegary chili sauce, originally made with red fermented bean curd and distantly similar in taste to Sriracha sauce, and a distinctive brown sweet bean sauce or hoisin sauce for dipping.

Traditionally, in these regions, a good brand of sweet bean sauce is considered top quality when its sweet taste results not from the addition of sugar, but as a direct result of the fermentation of the starches contained in the sauce's ingredients.

Without being asked, our waitress brought two spoons and two forks with a single order of Matcha Tsukushi ($6.35), a green tea dessert sampler of ice cream and cake with sweet bean sauce, which my friend and I wanted to share.

Another popular incarnation is mantou chuan or "steamed bun chuan"; it is commonly brushed with a sweet bean sauce (甜面酱, not to be confused with sweet red bean paste), and its taste serves as a foil to the often spicy meat chuan.

There are many different types of sweet bean sauces depending on the different compositions and the different method of production, and each variation represents the unique local style of a particular region, and even within the same geographical region, different manufacturers produce different kinds of sweet bean sauce.