TREND BITES:
Swicy
Swicy, or sweet + spicy, is an up-and-coming flavor for 2023. It’s a trend that’s gaining popularity for a couple different reasons. First, swicy is heavily used in Korean cuisine, which has been climbing in global popularity over the past few years, and many swicy sauces are based on South Korean yangnyeom (pronounced YANG-nyum) sauce. Second, thanks to hot honey, the foodservice industry realized people really like sweet heat. It’s a tasty treat for lovers of spicy food and the sweetness can even make it enjoyable for those who can’t handle much heat.
What, exactly, is "Swicy?"
Swicy is a portmanteau of sweet and spicy. It’s an adjective you can use to describe a meal or sauce that has a sweet and spicy flavor. For example, “Swicy Chicken,” “Swicy Sauce,” or “Swicy Wings.”
Sweet and Spicy are Perfect Together
Sweet and spicy flavors interact with your taste buds in different ways. Sweet things coat your taste buds, while spicy things bind to them. When your tongue is coated in sugar, it helps tame the spiciness.
The Buzz About Swicy
Several food trend prediction lists feature swicy, including The New York Times' “How Will Americans Eat in 2022” and Mashed's “Food Trends That Are About to Take Over 2023.” On Instagram, foodies are tagging fried chicken and mixed drinks with #swicy, and a TikTok search for #swicy will show you people tasting and reviewing sweet and spicy fried chicken.
Amp up Your Chicken Applications with these Swicy Sauce Recipes!
For our swicy applications, we made three delicious sauces that you can use in endless different ways. These sauces each have a slight kick, but their sweetness gives them a delectable flavor that even spice-hesitant eaters will absolutely love.
Dakgangjeong Sauce
In South Korea, one of the go-to appetizers is a tangy, sweet, crunchy fried chicken called dakgangjeong. You can use this Dakgangjeong sauce recipe to add your own version of dakgangjeong to your menu.
Thai Sticky Chicken Glaze
Try this Thai Sticky Chicken Glaze on your wings and boneless wings to add a little kick to your appetizer menu. Your patrons will devour Thai sticky wings on game days and order them as takeout and delivery for parties.
Honey Chipotle BBQ Sauce
Use this Honey Chipotle BBQ Sauce recipe as a dipping sauce or a topping. We used it on a chipotle grilled chicken bowl with sliced chicken, rice, avocado, cucumber, tomatoes, onion, pineapple, and leafy greens.
Popular Examples of Swicy
The swicy flavor is most commonly found in premade bottles of hot honey. In 2015, Mike’s Hot Honey gained such a surge of popularity that both consumers and restaurants started adding hot honey to a huge variety of applications.
You can purchase hot honey and other premade “swicy” foods like chili dark chocolate, mango salsa, sweet chili sauce, hot pepper jelly, and Mexican hot chocolate in retail locations and through foodservice distributors. Some operators have been developing their own swicy sauces, and they sometimes even use the word “swicy” in the sauce name to intrigue customers when they see it on the menu.
What's the Formula for Your Own Signature Swicy Sauce?
You can start with Korean yangnyeom sauce as an example. It's made by combining gochujang, soy sauce, sugar, rice wine vinegar, garlic, and ginger.
In our swicy sauce recipes, we included something spicy with something sweet. The honey chipotle BBQ sauce gets spice from chipotle chiles and sweetness from honey and brown sugar, while the Thai glaze uses a base of premade swicy sauce: Thai sweet chili sauce. You can also check out our December 2022 c-store e-newsletter about developing a signature sauce!
Other Sweet and Spicy Chicken Ideas from our Recipe Library
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