Matt Bray, Author at PepperScale

Chamoy substitutes: tamarind concentrate, li hing mui powder, umeboshi paste and plum sauce

What’s A Good Chamoy Substitute?

Hot sauce is the wrong bottle. Chamoy is fruit, salt, sour and chili all at once, and the swaps that work are the ones already doing three of the four. Here’s what to reach for, and how much to use.

What Is Chamoy?

by Matt Bray

Chamoy is a Mexican condiment that tastes sweet, sour, salty and a little spicy all at once, usually sold as a thick reddish-brown sauce made from dried fruit, chilies, lime and salt. It gets drizzled over mango, squeezed into a bag of chips, and swiped around the rim of a michelada glass. Here’s where chamoy came from, what’s actually in it, how spicy it really is, how it differs from Tajin, and what to do with a bottle once you have one at home.

Homemade Chamoy

by Matt Bray

Chamoy is the sweet-sour-salty sauce that shows up on fruit cups, mangonadas, shaved ice, and michelada rims, and the homemade version beats anything bottled. Dried apricots and dried hibiscus simmer down with chiles de árbol into a deep red sauce that leans salty and sour instead of candy-sweet. It takes about forty minutes, most of it hands-off, and it keeps about a month in the fridge. Here’s how the ingredients work together, how to adjust the heat and the sweetness, and what to put it on.

Chili Crisp Uses: What To Do With It Beyond Eggs And Noodles

by Matt Bray

You bought the jar, spooned it over an egg, and then it sat there. Here’s what else chili crisp is good for, from cooking with it to using the oil alone.

What’s A Good Chili Crisp Substitute?

by Matt Bray

Ran out of chili crisp? The closest stand-ins are the condiments built the same way. Here’s what to reach for, what to skip, and how to fake it from your pantry.

Banana Pepper Uses: What To Do With Them, Fresh Or Pickled

by Matt Bray

If you grow banana peppers, you already know the problem: the plant doesn’t hand you two or three at a time, it hands you thirty. And if you buy them, you’ve probably defaulted to the same move every time, which is slicing a few rings …

Pickled Banana Peppers

by Matt Bray

You love them on your deli sandwiches, so why not have them ready and waiting at home? This pickled banana pepper recipe is easy and surprisingly quick, largely because it is built for immediate eating rather than canning. The brine comes together in a single …

Chili Crisp vs. Chili Oil: What’s The Difference?

by Matt Bray

Chili crisp and chili oil sit side by side on the same shelf, look related through the glass, and get used almost interchangeably in English. They aren’t the same thing. The short version is that chili oil is a flavored oil and chili crisp is …