What Exactly Is Boom-Boom Sauce And What's It Made Of?

You've probably either heard of boom-boom sauce or will be glad to learn about it. Why? Because it's a creamy, sweet, tangy, and spicy dip that pairs with everything from fried shrimp to burgers and fries. At its most basic, boom-boom sauce is a whip-it-up-in-minute combination of mayonnaise, sweet chili sauce, (occasionally) ketchup and yellow mustard, and then whatever else you think should go in the bowl: scallions and toasted sesame oil, garlic, and onion powder, salt and pepper — you get the idea. It's your circus, after all, so make boom-boom sauce your monkey.

Like so many wonderful foods, boom-boom sauce is a marriage of East and West. In this case, it's mayonnaise, something Auguste Escoffier considered one of the classic French mother sauces, and sweet chili sauce, a universal dipping condiment that probably originated in Thailand. We say "probably" because sweet chili sauce, like boom-boom sauce, is instantly recognizable and remarkably difficult to trace: Who actually invented this accessible boom-boom treasure?

When you Google one of the dozens of boom-boom sauce recipes, you'll immediately see it credited to the Sheetz chain of convenience stores. Even though it's a large and successful privately-owned company with over 680 stores, Sheetz is very much an East Coast phenomenon, extending no farther west than Ohio. Moreover, you can only get Sheetz's Boom Boom Sauce in-store — the company bottled it for the first time in 2019 to give away to 600 customers, but to this day, it does not offer the product commercially. That would explain all of the copycat recipes, but it doesn't explain the origin of boom-boom sauce, which Sheetz doesn't claim to have invented.

Some people credit Bonefish Grill, a restaurant chain based in Tampa, Florida, with inventing bang bang shrimp in 2007, which has a Bang Sauce that's virtually identical to boom-boom sauce, if possibly a little sweeter. While there's no doubt about bang bang shrimp's popularity, it appears the dish already existed in Hawaii twenty years before it was purportedly invented. Mayonnaise was created by a French chef in 1756. Sweet chili sauce likely came from a beloved Thai chicken dipping sauce called nam chim kai. As for the combination of the two, boom-boom sauce sounds a lot like a sweetened version of Vietnamese Sốt Mayonnaise, a popular condiment for bánh mi sandwiches. As the saying goes, success has many fathers.

As mentioned, the Sheetz convenience store chain doesn't seem willing to grow a money tree in its backyard by selling its Boom Boom Sauce commercially. Similarly, there's no evidence that Bonefish Grill is making its Bang Sauce public, either. A food service purveyor known as Ken's offers its own version of Boom Boom Sauce — but it's a restaurant wholesaler, so alas, you can't buy gallon jugs for home consumption.

But, hey, all you need is a bowl, a whisk, the jar of mayo and the bottle of sweet chili sauce, and about 30 seconds, and boom: You've got the sauce. As the whisk does its work, you'll conjure the spirit of Escoffier and chili sauce makers from the Shunde district of Canton, each of whom will gaze in silent approval as you dip your fries in the boom boom sauce.