Homemade bang bang sauce
- Preparation 5 min
- Refrigeration 30 min
- Servings 1 cup
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🌶️ The bang bang sauce I stopped buying
Most bang bang sauce is three things in a bowl: mayo, sweet chili sauce, sriracha. It works. It’s also forgettable, and after the second batch I got tired of it tasting like spicy mayo with extra steps. So I started adding. Fresh ginger. Rice vinegar. Soy sauce. A little white sugar to hold the whole thing together. What comes out is creamy, sharp, hot and sweet all at once, and it takes five minutes with a whisk. No cooking, no blender, one bowl.
🫚 The five things the short version skips
The base stays: mayonnaise, Thai Kitchen sweet chili sauce, sriracha. Everyone agrees on that part. What I add on top is where it changes.
Fresh grated ginger gives a bright, almost peppery lift that ginger powder simply cannot fake. Rice vinegar keeps the sauce from turning heavy after two bites. Soy sauce brings the salt and the depth back toward where this sauce actually comes from. Lime juice wakes everything up. And the sugar is not a garnish, it’s the referee between the heat and the salt.
Take any one of those out and you get a decent sauce. Keep all five and you get one people ask about.
🍤 Where it earns its keep
This is the jar that makes a Tuesday dinner look deliberate. It goes over my grilled bang bang shrimp skewers with halloumi, but it’s just as good on air-fried shrimp, breaded chicken, salmon bites, poke bowls, fish tacos, sweet potato fries, or roasted cauliflower that needed a reason to exist. Make it the night before and it’s better. Keep a jar in the fridge all summer and you’ll find uses I haven’t thought of.
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🌶️ Dial the sriracha to your own heat
Two tablespoons is where I like it: hot enough to notice, not hot enough to stop eating. One tablespoon makes it kid-friendly. One teaspoon makes it barely warm. If you want the deep red color without the burn, a pinch of smoked paprika buys you the color and nothing else.
🫚 Grate the ginger fresh, every time
This is the one I won’t budge on. Powdered ginger tastes dusty and flat next to the real thing, and in a sauce this simple there’s nowhere for it to hide. A rasp grater turns a knob of ginger into pulp in about ten seconds. No grater? Mince it as fine as your patience allows, then mince it again.
🥄 The mayo decides everything
Your sauce will never be better than the mayonnaise you started with. Light mayo works, but you trade thickness for it and the sauce runs off whatever you drizzle it on.
⚖️ Sugar isn’t optional here
People see two tablespoons of sugar in a savory sauce and want to cut it. Don’t. The sugar is what keeps the sriracha and the soy from fighting each other, and without it the whole thing turns aggressive. A teaspoon of honey on top pushes it further if you want a stickier, glaze-like finish.
🧂 Swapping the sriracha
Sambal oelek is hotter and less sweet, so start with half. Gochujang goes deeper and funkier, and it’s my favorite of the substitutes. Harissa takes the sauce somewhere else entirely, which isn’t a problem as long as you know it’s happening.
❄️ Make it the day before
Fresh out of the bowl it’s good. After a night in the fridge the ginger, soy and sriracha stop being separate ingredients and become one flavor. Three days in and it’s at its peak. That’s the whole reason I make a double batch.
✅ What to serve bang bang sauce with
Shrimp is the obvious answer and it’s the right one, which is why it lives on my grilled bang bang shrimp skewers with halloumi all summer. It also works as a dip for my shrimp and crab cakes, spooned over my shrimp tacos instead of the usual crema, and drizzled across my shrimp nachos right before they hit the table. Beyond that: fried chicken, salmon bites, brussels sprouts, sweet potato fries, roasted cauliflower, or a bowl of rice that needed help.
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Ingredients
- ½ cup (125 ml) mayonnaise
- 2 tbsp (30 ml) sweet chili sauce (Thai Kitchen)
- 2 tbsp (30 ml) Sriracha sauce
- Juice of 1 lime
- 2 tbsp (30 ml) rice vinegar
- 1 tsp (5 ml) garlic powder
- 2 tbsp (25 g) white sugar
- 1 tbsp (15 ml) soy sauce
- 1 tbsp (15 ml) fresh grated ginger
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Preparation
- In a small bowl, whisk the mayonnaise, sweet chili sauce, Sriracha, lime juice, rice vinegar, garlic powder, white sugar, soy sauce and fresh grated ginger together until the sauce is smooth and there are no streaks of mayo left. It goes from separate to one sauce in about a minute.
- Taste it now, before it chills. More Sriracha if you want more heat, more sugar if it feels sharp, another splash of soy if it needs depth.
- Cover and refrigerate at least 30 minutes so the ginger and soy settle into the mayo. Overnight is better.
- Serve it cold, drizzled, spooned or set out as a dip. It keeps 5 to 7 days in an airtight jar.
At its core, mayonnaise, sweet chili sauce and sriracha. That’s the version most restaurants serve. Mine keeps that base and adds lime juice, rice vinegar, soy sauce, garlic powder, white sugar and fresh grated ginger, which is what turns it from spicy mayo into something with an actual Asian backbone. Nine ingredients, one bowl, one whisk.
Mildly, and you control it. Sweet chili sauce is barely hot on its own, so the heat comes almost entirely from the sriracha. At two tablespoons it lands somewhere around a medium salsa. Cut it to one and most people won’t call it spicy at all. The mayonnaise and the sugar both work against the burn, so it never builds the way a straight hot sauce does.
Anything fried, grilled or roasted that could use a cold, creamy counterweight. Shrimp is the classic pairing, breaded or grilled. Chicken tenders, salmon bites, fish tacos, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, sweet potato fries, rice bowls, burgers. I’ve also used it as a salad dressing thinned with a spoonful of water, which was not the plan but worked better than it had any right to.
No, though they share a mayonnaise base and get confused constantly. Yum yum sauce is the pale orange Japanese steakhouse sauce built on tomato paste, butter and paprika, and it’s sweet and mild. Bang bang sauce is pink-red, built on sweet chili and sriracha, and it has heat and acid that yum yum sauce doesn’t. Different sauces, different jobs.
Closer, yes. Boom boom sauce is also a mayo-and-chili sauce, but it leans on ketchup and horseradish for its kick, which gives it a tangier, more American profile. Bang bang goes toward sweet chili, sriracha and ginger. If you like one you’ll probably like the other, but they don’t taste the same side by side.
Five to seven days in an airtight container, and it improves for the first three or four. The flavors settle and stop tasting like separate ingredients. Don’t freeze it: mayonnaise separates when it thaws and the texture never comes back. If it looks thick after a few days, a splash of rice vinegar loosens it right up.
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