[Cecilia Philips] If you're like me on a scorching hot summer day, a refreshing michelada just hits the spot.

Bubbly effervescent beer, rich tomato mix.

But it's really the sweet, tangy, spicy, and even hint of saltiness that you'll find around the edge that sends your taste buds into a frenzy.

That my friends, is the enchanting power of chamoy.

A Mexican condiment, so loved that it even has its own national holiday.

But let's pause for a moment.

Since it's a quintessential Mexican condiment, it has to be from Mexico, right?

[Lesley Téllez] So the origin story of chamoy I have found to be a little murky.

[Ellen Riojas Clark] There really isn't much research on it.

[Cecilia] That hasn't stopped us before.

Chamoy's mysterious story takes us on a spicy adventure from Mexico throughout Asia and back again.

So grab a michelada or a chamoynada and let's dive headfirst into this culinary mystery.

We are here in the mission district of San Francisco to meet Chef Abraham Nuñez, raised along the border between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego.

He's the founder of Chicáno Nuevo, and he's about to give us the lowdown on chamoy and how he gets creative with it.

What is chamoy?

For people who don't know what it is.

[Abraham Nuñez] So chamoy is a tangy, sweet, citrusy, spicy, kind of salty sauce.

[Cecilia] My first experience with chamoy is probably eating candy.

[Abraham] We typically have it just season our candies, fruit or any kinda like vegetables, like cucumbers, zucchini.

[Cecilia] Okay.

For all you chamoy newbies out there, this is chamoy, but this is also chamoy.

I know that might be a little confusing, we'll get into it, but we're starting with this chamoy typically made from fruit like plums and apricot that is dried, then salted and seasoned with lime and chili, creating a mouthwatering flavor.

[Lesley] I grew up knowing chamoy as being in these little salted plums, which are not liquid, right?

It's a candy.

In the saladitos.

[Rachel Laudan] I moved to Mexico in the mid 1990s.

In stores there, there would always be jars filled with reddish, brownish, chewy objects.

They were called chamoy then.

[Cecilia] So tell me about your first memory of chamoy.

[Abraham] I remember being five, six years old, begging my mom for change out of her pocket so I can run across to the corner store in TJ in Plaza Rio.

So we would buy these and the way we ate them was we stuck them in a lemon, orange, grapefruit, and then you stick the saladitos in there.

And so we're gonna have what I have been having as a kid from four or five years old to 34 or 35 years old.

Ready?

Cheers.

[Cecilia] How do you eat this?

[Abraham] Put it in your mouth.

[Cecilia] That is saladito.

[Abraham] Yeah!

[Cecilia] That was so salty.

But it was good.

So I love what you said with Saladito, right?

But then you also called it Chamoy.

Yeah.

So let's talk about that too.

[Abraham] Sal means salt.

So it's referring to these for more kind of older generations that was known as dry Chamoy.

[Cecilia] So I can totally see how this salty sweet snack is such a hit in Mexico, but that's not the only place where we find this kind of treat.

[Lesley] The most surprising thing that I was unraveling was maybe a connection to Asia, particularly with the Philippines, because there's a word that sounds like chamoy.

In Tagalog, there's a dessert called champoy, but there's something else called tsampoy.

It starts with a T. [Cecilia] So champoy, tsampoy, or kiamoy, Depending on where you are in the Philippines, is like a dried and soured plum, prune or apricot that was dipped in salt.

Sound familiar?

[Lesley] There's already a lot of connections between Mexico and the Philippines because of the trade that existed for like 250 years between the two countries.

[Cecilia] So the Spanish roll into Mexico in 1519, and they're like, we're just gonna take this land and call it New Spain.

They colonized the region in 1521, and then went and did the same thing to the Philippines using both countries as a way station to transport people and goods that became known as the Manila or Acapulco Galleons.

[Lesley] The items didn't just come from the Philippines, they also came from different parts of Asia.

[Rachel] The Philippines, by that stage had lots of Chinese in it.

[Cecilia] And what those Chinese immigrants brought to Manila in the 15th and 16th century was a culinary practice called Li Hing Mui, where they'd salt plums to keep them fresh and flavorful.

Li Hng Mui actually means traveling plump, which is exactly what it did.

[Rachel] In Hawaii it was called crack seed.

Chinese name in Hawaii for crack seed is See Mui.

Crack Seed in Hawaii is clearly of Chinese origin.

[Cecilia] That's because Chinese laborers who came to work at the plantations in Hawaii brought See Mui or Crack Seed to the islands in the 19th century.

[Rachel] Well, it is this whole tradition of salty dried fruits, [Cecilia] But why would this become so popular?

[Rachel] I've heard it said for people who are doing hard work in hot climates, having one of these to chew on relieved your thirst.

Whether that's true, I don't know, but you find them all the way down coast of China into Southeast Asia.

The path between China and Mexico was much less clear.

[Cecilia] One theory would be, since Manila was one of the main stopover points for the whole East and South Asia trade, those ships would make their way to Mexico.

So it's possible that Crack Seed or chamoy came via the Philippines through Chinese immigrants.

[Abraham] This is dry chamoy.

Your pouring is wet chamoy.

[Cecilia] So now we can get into it.

[Abraham] The earliest memory I have of chamoy in this, in this packet.

[Cecilia] Whoa!

[Abraham] That takes me back so far.

[Cecilia] I don't know why I thought it was gonna be sweet.

Ugh, I don't know how I feel about this.

[Cecilia] As you can see, chamoy isn't just dried candy.

It's also a paste, a sauce, a condiment.

It's what's on the rim of this michelada.

So what's up with all that?

[Lesley] If you were gonna go into any store and ask for chamoy, the shop owner would refer you to a bottle of red liquid.

It's kind morphed into now the condiment and sort of a concentrated paste.

[Cecilia] We actually think we have the answer to this one.

But first, let's go to learn a bit more about Abraham and his chamoy sauce, shall we?

You talk about kind of living on these two sides in the US but then also Tijuana.

[Abraham] Right?

The Chicáno Nuevo that I do now, which we're gonna open on Mission Virginia soon, I do gritty Tijuana Street food through this San Francisco Bay Area agricultural filter.

[Cecilia] Why did you wanna recreate those flavors, like from childhood?

[Abraham] Because whatever creative success I've had with food or personal feeling of accomplishment I felt when I've told a true story about my culture.

[Cecilia] What else were you able to learn as you were looking into how to recreate this sauce?

[Abraham] In researching for my own recipe for my chamoy, I came across its Chinese origins, but also connected to the Japanese practice of Umeboshi.

[Cecilia] Umeboshi, we learned is a technique that the Japanese perfected where they take a plum called ume and salt it and then brine it.

So maybe the paste version came from Japan.

[Rachel] The Japanese have been in Mexico for a long time.

[Cecilia] In the mid to late 19th century, you get more immigration of Chinese and Japanese people into Mexico, but this time they come straight from China or Japan.

So how do we make your version of chamoy?

[Abraham] So we boil up all the ingredients and they're gonna blend them and strain them and seed them with lime and salt, And it's gonna be this beautiful, tangy, sweet, acidic, spicy, flavorful mouthfeel.

[Cecilia] So we were having a hard time getting to the bottom of the Umeboshi Japanese connection of chamoy sauce until the team found.

[Miguel] My Name is Miguel Iwadare, Teikichi Iwadare.

was my grandfather.

He arrived in Mexico in 1923.

He came to Mexico seeking fortune because the industrial revolution in Japan.

[Cecilia] Due to the industrial revolution that was taking place in Japan in the 19 hundreds, farmers and skilled laborers were finding it hard to work in Japan.

So they migrated to Mexico and the United States for opportunities.

[Miguel] In 1950, he opened factory and he began producing a staple food in Japan that is called umeboshi.

[Cecilia] Since umeboshi in Japan is made with ume plum, which he couldn't find in Mexico, Miguel's grandfather started using apricot.

[Miguel] He also introduced into the market kind of chili powder called Brinquitos.

So we used to pick up Chamoy and Brinquitos and mix everything.

[Cecilia] Wait, why did he call it chamoy and not umeboshi?

[Miguel] Maybe because of the Chinese name for umeboshi, which sounds like Shi Mui.

We do not know why.

[Cecilia] The umeboshi to chamoy journey almost ends through a mismanagement of the business, which forced Miguel's grandfather to file for bankruptcy and shut down the factory.

[Miguel] So they had to sell everything.

After the factory went bankruptcy, it all disappeared [Cecilia] Until many years later, [Miguel] Something called chamoy began to appear in the market.

[Ellen] So in the seventies, it became more popular in Mexico [Miguel] In the eighties, and it was almost exactly this sauce.

[Rachel] What is now called chamoy is actually very recent from the 1990s.

[Cecilia] So when it became popular, seems to be hard to pinpoint, but what we do know is the name of the company that seemed to have put it on the map.

[Lesley] It's called Dulces Miguelito.

[Cecilia] It was founded in Mexico City in the 1970s by a gentleman who had worked at a Japanese fruit pulp factory, which had gone under.

And when it did, he was given the recipe and the machine, [Miguel] They sold the machinery to most of their employees, and it was one of them that continue to produce chamoy.

And this chili powder, [Rachel] It is both Asian, but it is also now totally Mexican.

Food moves, and it becomes the property of the people it moves to while still remaining the property of the people it's come from.

[Lesley] My perspective is that in Mexican cooking, people really appreciate these, these baroque flavors.

They really appreciate a lot of things happening at once.

The fruity, salty, spicy has already been around for a long time, and I think what chamoy did was add in this sour kick to it, and I think people just went nuts over it.

[Abraham] We've got a, we've got a dripper, a low rider, [Cecilia] A a low rider.

Oh, in the mission.

That's perfect.

[Abraham] What are the odds?

[Cecilia] That's Perfect.

A low riding, low riding rim here.

[Abraham] A lot of people have not known for decades, they've been eating chamoy via the micheladas.

[Cecilia & Abraham] Cheers.

Cheers.

[Abraham] Do you feel like crushing this right now though?

Yeah, [Cecilia] I do too!

All right.

Here we go.

[Cecilia] Wow.

Who knew this mysterious and delicious condiment could have such a rich and robust history.

Thanks for joining us.

And before you leave, let us know in the comments below.

If you like chamoy, we realize it's an acquired taste, and if you do like it, which form do you like best candy, paste, saladito?

Thanks for watching.

And also tell us which dish we should explore next beyond the menu.

Cheers.

Tangy!

Support for this program comes from Krishnan Shaw Family Foundation and supporters of the KQED studios Fund.