FOOD NEWS
What Exactly Is Boom-Boom Sauce And What's It Made Of?
By Tom Maxwell
Boom-boom sauce is a creamy, sweet, tangy, and spicy dip that pairs with everything from shrimp to burgers and fries. Typically, it's a mixture of mayonnaise and sweet chili sauce.
Occasionally, ketchup and mustard are also added, and you can experiment with including scallions and toasted sesame oil, garlic, onion powder, salt, and pepper.
Boom-boom sauce is a marriage of East and West, as Auguste Escoffier considers mayonnaise a classic French mother sauce, while sweet chili sauce probably originated in Thailand.
The sauce's origin is unknown, but some credit a Florida chain, Bonefish Grill, with inventing bang bang shrimp in 2007, which features a sauce identical to boom-boom sauce.
However, bang bang shrimp existed in Hawaii twenty years before it was purportedly invented. Boom-boom sauce also sounds like a sweetened version of Vietnamese Sốt Mayonnaise.
The sauce is difficult to find at stores, so you can make it at home by whisking mayonnaise and sweet chili sauce for about 30 seconds.