Chamoy (Salty and Spicy Mexican Pickled Fruit Sauce)

Chamoy can be easy. Bottles of it line the shelves of any Mexican grocer, each filled with a thick, bright red or brownish liquid that's preloaded with its signature mix of flavors, at once deeply salty, sweet, sour, and packed with chile heat. Buy a bottle, squirt it onto sliced fruit or into a refreshingly icy chamoyada or mangonada along with some Tajín, and you're good to go.

Well, sorta. Taste that stuff in the bottle by itself. It's not always particularly good, and not just because it's so intensely flavored. While brash, the flavors themselves can be tinny and thin, spiked with sharp daggers of something, just not something delicious. Since it's used as a condiment on things that are delicious, like sweet fresh mango and other fruits, you can get away with using bottled chamoy; it'll work fine. For those who have a nostalgic connection to the bottled products, it may be more than fine—it may be a pleasure. After all, we all have processed foods we love no matter how processed they are.

But there's also a lot to be said for making chamoy from scratch, an easy task that offers worlds of flavor possibilities, and just so much complexity and depth. Put some homemade chamoy on fruit and in drinks and the result is the closest thing to fireworks going off in one's mouth that I've ever experienced: You will taste colors. You will feel the sonic booms of blinding sensation. You will ride razzle-dazzle blazes that pop and scream and then shimmer down in pyrotechnic rain.

So, yeah. Chamoy. You should make it.

Enough Waxing Poetic: What Is Chamoy?

Chamoy is a Mexican sauce with Asian roots. Some origin stories point to a Japanese immigrant who moved to Mexico and opened a store in the 1950s or 60s where he sold umeboshi, the preserved pickled plums. His customers supposedly developed a taste for the product, which he sold as "chamoy." After his retirement, he passed the recipe to an employee who went on to found a company called Miguelito that brought chamoy to a mass scale.

What's weird about this story is that "chamoy" doesn't sound anything like "umeboshi." But it does have a resemblance to words from other Asian languages for related preserved stone fruit products, including see mui in Chinese, xí muôi in Vietnamese, and kiamoy in Tagalog. It's not exactly clear why a Japanese person would choose a non-Japanese term for his product, unless chamoy was already something of a known quantity in Mexico when he set up shop. Experts who have dug further into chamoy's history seem pretty confident these salty-sweet snacks were in Mexico before the Japanese immigrant and his employee popularized it, very possibly via Chinese or Filipino influences (which would make a lot more sense given the name similarities).

At its simplest, chamoy is just these salted, preserved stone fruits, or their pulp, or a dried powder made from them. But it's become much more than that, namely, a sauce spiked with hot chiles, aromatic spices, sweet dried fruit, sour hibiscus, and more.

How to Make Chamoy From Scratch

Possibly due to convenience, most from-scratch recipes you'll see for chamoy today don't involve the salted, dried fruit that gave rise to it. Those recipes get sourness from ingredients like hibiscus and lime, and sweetness and body from dried fruits like apricots. Umeboshi or see mui or xí muôi, though, are totally MIA.

I figured that as long as I was going to go to the trouble of writing up a chamoy recipe, I might as well pay respects to the sauce's origins by taking the extra step of actually putting the chamoy back in the chamoy. So my recipe calls for umeboshi on top of the other ingredients.

Making it is as simple as briefly simmering all of the ingredients in water, then pureeing them to a thick sauce. Exactly how thick is up to you: you can make a sauce that's so thick it's verging on being a purée, or one that's thinned out to a more pourable consistency. Just make sure not to thin it too much, because you do want some viscosity.

How to Serve Chamoy

Chamoy is perfect spooned onto fresh fruit like sliced mango, pineapple, guava, and more. Beyond that, it can be used in drinks, whether alcoholic or not. It's not uncommon to add it to micheladas as the sour-spicy source, and it's also a key ingredient in the eponymous chamoyada, an icy treat loaded with chamoy, shaved ice or a frozen fruit puree, chunks of fresh fruit, and other goodies. When made with pureed frozen mango, it's often called a mangonada.

Suffice it to say, if you make some chamoy at home, there are plenty of ways to put it to good use.