Mangonada

Recipes for mangonadas are, at their simplest, little more than instructions for assembly. Making the frozen drink can be as easy as layering icy mango puree, salty-spicy bottled chamoy, and chunks of fresh mango in a glass and garnishing it with the salted chile heat of Tajín. But there are mangonadas, and then there are mangonadas. While even the least ambitious mangonada recipe will yield something undeniably refreshing and delicious, there are things we can do to make them spectacularly, mind-bendingly so. And, because this is Serious Eats, that's just what we're gonna do.

The good news is that even an ambitious mangonada recipe is still a relatively easy one. The keys to ensuring the absolute best result come down to the two main components: the frozen mango puree and the chamoy. Most recipes don't put much thought or effort into either. The chamoy comes out of a bottle, the mango is usually fresh or frozen chunks blitzed in a blender with ice to make a sorbet-like puree. There's nothing wrong with either of those options, but they can be done better.

In a funny twist to create the best mangonada, we're going invert things: The mango is going to be a packaged product (not fresh!), and the chamoy will be made from scratch. Were you expecting that? Read on for why.

What is a Mangonada?

Before getting to the details on how to optimize a mangonada, it helps to first define the drink: A mangonada is a bold and bracing mango-flavored variant of what's known as a chamoyada, which is itself a Mexican shaved-ice drink (or raspado in Spanish) featuring various fruit and, most importantly, the salty-tart sauce called chamoy.

Often built in layers in a generous serving cup, and garnished with a variety of equally bold and bracing treats like chile-coated tamarind straws, a good mangonada is all about joyous intensity: intensely cold and refreshing, intensely sweet, intensely salty, intensely tart, intensely spicy, and all-around intensely flavorful. It's a fifty-car sensory pileup that is all about more being more in the most glorious way possible—sometimes cranking all flavors up works to balance them out.

Mangonadas are also just as much a visual riot, glowing with vivid yellow, purple, pink, and red. Its colors blind like the sun, an atomic feast on all fronts. It's hard to think of another summertime treat that scratches so many conceivable itches at once, lighting up every sensory nerve cell your brain has to offer.

Tips for Making the Best Mangonadas

How to Get the Best Mango Flavor

A mangonada is only as good as its frozen mango base. Most mangonada recipes have you blend fresh mango, frozen mango chunks, or a combination, with ice to make a sorbet-like puree. That might work in locales where mangoes are more consistently awesome, but it's not what I would recommend for most of us in the United States.

The mango landscape has improved considerably in the US compared to some years ago. No longer are most of us limited to the relatively lackluster Tommy Atkins variety that was at one point more or less synonymous with "mango." Today it's easier to find much more flavorful mangoes, like the Ataúlfo (also sold as the "champagne" mango), but it'd be a pretty big exaggeration to say we in the US are living in a mango renaissance.

The fact of the matter is, our mangoes still are often not that great. Even frozen mango chunks, which one might expect to be packed at peak ripeness—as is usually the case with many other kinds of frozen produce—are frequently underripe and weak in flavor. With such big consistency and quality issues, using fresh mangoes or frozen mango chunks just isn't the best approach here.

Much, much better is to start with frozen or canned mango pulp, and if I could steer you towards any one variety, I'd strongly suggest you find pulp made from Alphonso mangoes. These products are normally found at South Asian grocers, like Patel Brothers, though the canned version can also be ordered online. There's really no contest as far as flavor is concerned: Alphonso mango pulp explodes with concentrated mango intensity, and has a fragrance that goes way beyond merely toprical to beautifully floral and perfumed.

The frozen pulp will most likely require a special shopping trip, which is perhaps an annoyance unless you happen to live near a source, but it's also the easiest to transform into the sorbet-like treat needed to make a mangonada. If you use canned, you'll have to freeze the pulp first (or churn it in an ice cream maker); neither of those options is difficult, but they will take longer.

If all else fails, your next best option would be a good quality mango sorbet, which more or less comes ready-made for mangonadas, though I like to mix in a little fresh lime juice for a jolt of acid electricity in every bite. Talenti, one widely available ice cream and sorbet brand, sells an Alphonso mango sorbet, so that would be a particularly good choice.

Upgrading the Chamoy

Chamoy is the other absolutely critical component of a mangonada, and here too there's potential for improvement. I write this with qualification, because I know bottled chamoy brands can hold a dear place in the hearts of many, especially of those who have grown up with it. So while I think homemade chamoy is a very exciting step for making the most delicious mangonadas, I also respect anyone who feels their bottled chamoy is irreplaceable and above fault—we all have such loyalties in our lives.

That said, making chamoy from scratch opens up a world of possibilities in terms of flavor and texture. By making your own, you can dial in exactly how spicy you want yours to be, as well as how tart, how salty, and how thick. I've published a homemade chamoy recipe to get you started, but I encourage anyone who follows it to think of it as a jumping-off point. It's a very easy recipe to adjust so that you get the flavor and consistency of the chamoy exactly where you want it.

Putting It All Together

Like I said, aside from the two suggested upgrades I've explained above, there's not much to a mangonada recipe beyond the assembly itself. So, an important note on the assembly: The quantities and servings in this recipe are approximate and vague on purpose. The recipe may well yield more frozen mango puree or other components than you need. That's because different people can have very different ideas about how large a single serving of mangonada should be. I, for example, can eat a massive one built in a pint glass, but I served some to family recently and they didn't come close to finishing the pint-sized ones I made for them.

At the same time, I think a mangonada is most impressive visually when it fills and nearly overflows its vessel. Since different people own glasses of different sizes, and since they may want mangonadas of different sizes, there's no easy way to say exactly how much of each component you will need.

If you make huge mangonadas the way I like, you may only get about two out of this recipe. If you want smaller ones, you'll be able to make more. And either way, you may still have some unused components left afterwards. I'm sure you'll find a way to gobble them up.