Homemade Mexican Chamoy Sauce
1
on Mar 01, 2025
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Add this tangy, sweet, salty, and spicy authentic Mexican Chamoy Sauce to your kitchen! Made from dried fruits, chiles, lime, and salt, this flavorful condiment is perfect for pairing with your favorite snacks and dishes.
With just 7 simple ingredients and 5 minutes of active prep, you can whip up a batch of this versatile sauce—ideal for rimming cocktails, drizzling over fresh fruit, spicing up snacks, or slathering on grilled corn.
Why You’ll Love this Recipe
My homemade chamoy sauce is not only super quick and easy to make with just a handful of ingredients—it’s also better for you since it’s free of preservatives and artificial food colorants found in many store-bought versions. Just measure, simmer, and blend, and you’ll have a fresh, flavorful chamoy in no time.
If you’re used to flavors being neatly separated into sweet, salty, spicy, or tangy, chamoy is here to shake things up! This exciting flavor mash-up brings the best of all worlds, adding big, bold taste to everything it touches.
This vibrant and versatile condiment can be used in both sweet and savory dishes—drizzle it over fresh fruit, rim your cocktails, or even slather it on grilled corn. Plus, you can make it as a thin, pourable sauce or reduce it into a thick, spreadable paste depending on how you want to use it!
What is Chamoy Sauce?
Chamoy is a vibrant, syrup-like fruit sauce that’s simultaneously sweet, fiery, and sour—it’s also a staple in Mexican cuisine. Its roots trace back generations, but the origin story is muddled. It’s likely that the sauce was a derivative of Filipino champoy (a sauce that is made with pickled fruit with a similarly tangy and spicy taste), which arrived in Mexico as early as the 1500s.
Others attribute it to a Japanese immigrant named Teikichi Iwadare in the 1950s, who made a sauce with salted umeboshi plums (a variety of apricots). This story is perhaps less convincing, as the name supposedly comes from Chinese suan mei (“sour plum”) or Vietnamese xí muôi (“preserved prune”)—why a Japanese immigrant would use a Chinese or Vietnamese name is unclear. Either way, it evolved into the craveable all-flavors-in-one condiment we know today!
Ingredients & Substitutions
The complete list of ingredients, quantities, and instructions can be found in the printable recipe card below.
- Granulated Sugar – Starting with plain white sugar ensures a neutral sweetness, leaving plenty of room for the fruit, chiles, and seasonings to shine.
- Dried Jamaica Flowers – Also known as hibiscus, these dark magenta petals add a naturally beautiful hue and sour flavor. You can find them in bulk at any Latin market, buy online, or use torn-open hibiscus tea bags.
- Dried Apricots – These fruits add honeyed sweetness with a rich, almond-y undertone. Feel free to swap in prunes, but note that the flavor won’t be quite as sweet or complex if you do. You can also use dried mango.
- Chile de Arbol – These skinny, bright red chiles pack a wallop of grassy, nutty spiciness with a Scoville heat index that’s up to 15 times more spicy than a jalapeño—perfect for balancing out all the sweetness.
- Lime Juice – The acidity of lime juice helps emphasize the tart flavor hibiscus brings to the party. Make sure to use freshly squeezed juice for the best flavor.
- Tajín & Salt – Tajín is a salty chili-lime seasoning blend that often gets paired with chamoy, especially for rimming cocktails. I like to add some directly to the sauce for an added punch of flavor, along with a touch more salt if the heat becomes too intense to keep adding Tajín.
How to Make Chamoy
It’s a snap to whip up my Tajín chamoy sauce. Here’s how it’s done:
Step 1: Simmer. In a medium saucepan, combine water, dried Jamaica flowers, dried apricots, sugar, and chile de arbol. Bring to a boil, then cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer for 30 minutes.
Step 2: Cool. Remove from heat and let the mixture cool, uncovered, for 10–15 minutes.
Step 3: Blend. Transfer the cooled mixture to a blender or food processor. Add lime juice and blend until smooth. Adjust seasoning with extra lime juice, Tajin, or salt as desired. For a thinner consistency, add additional water or lime juice.
Step 4: Store & Serve. Pour the chamoy into a glass container for storage and easy measuring.
Serving Suggestions
The best part about this zesty sauce is how many ways you can put it to use—it brings a unique, salty-spicy kick to every sip or bite. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:
- Chamoy Rim: Use your homemade chamoy for making chamoyadas or frozen mangonadas, or use it to make a chamoy rim for other cocktails like my skinny cantaritos.
- Chamoy Popsicles: Adding a drizzle of this savory-sweet syrup to your favorite paletas is a simple way to snazz them up. I particularly like using it with my pineapple paletas and mango chili paletas.
- Chamoy Dip: As I mentioned earlier, the fact that this dippable sauce has all the flavors—savory, salty, spicy, sweet, and sour—it plays nicely with a wide range of foods. I especially love mango with chamoy! Try serving chamoy sauce on Mexican fruit cups or Mexican fruit salad, or for dipping grilled meats like my tequila lime carne asada skewers.
- Chamoy on Grilled Corn: Chamoy adds a bold sweet, tangy, and spicy kick to grilled Mexican street corn, whether slathered on elote (corn on the cob) or drizzled over esquites (corn in a cup)—pair it with mayo, cotija cheese, and a sprinkle of Tajín for the ultimate street food flavor!
Homemade Chamoy Sauce Expert Tips & Tricks
Dried Fruit – Dried apricots add honeyed sweetness with a rich, almond-y undertone. Feel free to swap in prunes, but note that the flavor won’t be quite as sweet or complex if you do. You can also use dried mango.
Sauce or Paste – Wondering how to make chamoy thick? Simmer a bit longer with the lid off until it reaches the right viscosity for your needs. Need it thinner? Add an extra drizzle of water or lime juice.
Use a High-Speed Blender – Chamoy should be smooth, regardless of how thick you like it.
Be Patient – You need to give all the flavors time to meld, so make sure you simmer the sauce for a minimum of 30 minutes before blending.
Storage Instructions
- Refrigerated – Homemade chamoy sauce should keep well in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a couple of weeks.
- Frozen – For longer storage, you can freeze chamoy for up to 6 months, then defrost overnight in the fridge when you’re ready to use it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Nope. While these two beloved Mexican condiments are often paired with one another and share some similar ingredients, they are very different. Tajin is a shakeable seasoning blend made with dried chiles, lime, and salt, while chamoy is a sauce made from dried apricots, hibiscus (or sometimes vinegar), sugar, lime juice, chiles, and salt.
Hmmm, I’m not sure I’ve tried it! They don’t necessarily sound like a match made in heaven to me, but I’m game to try. Generally speaking, I prefer using chamoy with foods that have bright, citrusy, fruity flavors.
It’s believed that Mexican chamoy was originally derived from a Filipino sauce, which was in turn influenced by Chinese immigrants in the Philippines. So, in a sense, I suppose it’s both!
Because it’s yummy, of course! It is unlike any other sauce I’ve tried, boasting a sweet, spicy, salty, sour, savory flavor profile that’ll keep you coming back for more.
More Mexican Condiment Recipes
If you tried this Homemade Chamoy Sauce Recipe or any other recipe on my blog, please leave a 🌟 star rating and let me know how it went in the comments below!
Homemade Chamoy Sauce Recipe
Equipment
Ingredients
- 4 cups water
- 1/2 cup granulated sugar
- 1/2 cup dried Jamaica (hibiscus) flowers
- 1 cup dried apricots
- 2 dried chile de arbol peppers, stemmed
- Lime juice, (to taste)
- Tajin, (to taste)
- Salt, (to taste)
Instructions
- In a medium saucepan, combine water, dried Jamaica flowers, dried apricots, sugar, and chile de arbol. Bring to a boil, then cover, reduce heat to low, and simmer for 30 minutes.
- Remove from heat and let the mixture cool, uncovered, for 10–15 minutes.
- Transfer the cooled mixture to a blender or food processor. Add lime juice and blend until smooth. Adjust seasoning with extra lime juice, Tajin, or salt as desired. For a thinner consistency, add additional water or lime juice.
- Pour the chamoy into glass containers for storage. Enjoy it with fresh fruit or use it to rim cocktail glasses.
Video
Notes
- 1 batch makes 4 cups.
- Refrigerated – Homemade chamoy sauce should keep well in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a couple of weeks.
- Frozen – For longer storage, you can freeze chamoy for up to 6 months, then defrost overnight in the fridge when you’re ready to use it.
- Sauce or Paste – To make chamoy thicker, simmer a bit longer with the lid off until it reaches the right viscosity for your needs. Need it thinner? Add an extra drizzle of water or lime juice.
- Use a High-Speed Blender – Chamoy should be smooth, regardless of how thick you like it.
- Be Patient – You need to give all the flavors time to meld, so make sure you simmer the sauce for a minimum of 30 minutes before blending.
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
This homemade chamoy sauce is so easy to make and beats pre-made bottled chamoy sauce with colorants and full of preservatives.