Chamoy is a condiment from Mexico that is typically served as a dip for fresh fruit. It is made with fruit, such as apricot, mango or plum, chilies and lime juice and is bottled and sold in varying degrees of spiciness.
This sweet, salty, sour, spicy sauce is an explosion of flavor and completely addictive. Drizzle over fresh fruit, rim your cocktail glass, heck, eat it with a spoon! I guarantee you’ll find a million and one reasons to make this sauce. Vegan and gluten-free!
If you could wrap the spirit of Mexican cuisine in one food, it would be chamoy.
It’s salty, spicy, sweet, sour and all of those flavors are at their maximum level. It is exuberant, flashy, and unapologetically bold—basically everything I love about Mexican food.
You most commonly find chamoy sauce served at fruit stands where it gets drizzled over fresh mango, melon, pineapple, and hunks of coconut. It also graces other sweet street food like paletas (popsicles), raspas (shaved ice), and helados (ice cream).
WHAT IS CHAMOY SAUCE?
A glass cup filled with Chamoy Sauce with the sauce dripping down the side and a spoon in the cup.
Chamoy sauce is a Mexican condiment made from ingredients that represent all the flavors on the palate: Sweet dried apricots, spicy chile de árbol, salty Tajín seasoning, and sour hibiscus flowers.
According to food historian,Rachel Laudan, Chinese immigrants brought sweet, sour snacks made from Prunus mume, a fruit similar to an apricot when they came to Mexico centuries ago. It is the same fruit used to make Japanese umeboshi.
Sliced mango on a white plate sitting on a marble table topped with Chamoy Sauce with a lime half on the plate.
In Cantonese these snacks were called see mui, pronounced see moy, which eventually became cha-moy in spanish.
Chamoy is also sold as popular Mexican wet or dried plums (wet in the sauce, and dried coated in powder) as well as numerous Mexican candies, but the sauce is my favorite, and the easiest one to make at home!