What Chamoy means
Chamoy is a Mexican salsa or sauce name of Chinese (via Spanish) origin meaning "salted preserved fruit". It comes from Cantonese see mui / Mandarin suan mei (sour preserved plum). It is pronounced chah-MOY, and it is most associated with Sinaloa.
The leading account makes it a Chinese-Mexican adaptation of salted dried plum brought by Asian migrants along the Manila galleon route and later by Chinese communities in Sinaloa. The case rests largely on the sound of see mui, so treat the derivation as probable rather than proven.
This is a site about what Mexican words mean, so there is no recipe here. For the name itself: Salsa simply means sauce. The interesting names are the older ones: mole from Nahuatl mōlli, guacamole from āhuacamōlli, and pico de gallo, "rooster's beak", whose name nobody can fully explain.
