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.
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
Chili crisp is a Chinese chili oil loaded with crunchy solids: fried garlic, shallots, chili flakes, and often fermented soybeans, all suspended in a savory, spicy oil. It’s the condiment spice lovers reach for to lift eggs, noodles, dumplings, and just about anything else. Here’s …
The Hungarian wax pepper brings a specific combination to a dish: a solid medium heat, 5,000 to 10,000 Scoville heat units (SHU), wrapped in a bright, sweet-tangy, almost pickle-ready flavor. Using PepperScale’s flavor families, it’s Green & Grassy chili with an unusually vivid tang, most …
The cayenne and the serrano are both familiar medium-hot chilies, but most cooks meet them in completely different forms: the cayenne almost always as a dried powder on the spice rack, the serrano almost always as a fresh green pod in the produce aisle. Both …
The serrano and the jalapeño are the two great fresh green chilies of Mexican cooking, so alike in flavor that they’re often used interchangeably. Both are Capsicum annuum, both are picked and eaten green well before they’d ever ripen to red, and both belong to …
Serrano peppers are one of the most useful chilies you can cook with, but they can still be surprisingly hard to track down. And when they’re missing, the right substitute matters. Reach for the wrong one and you can lose the crisp, bright, grassy character …
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