The best Canarian food to take home is the stuff you cannot buy in a British supermarket: mojo, gofio, palm honey, a vacuum-packed goat cheese, a bottle of volcanic-soil wine and a bottle of honey rum. Most of it is cheap, all of it is sold at the airport as well as in the towns, and the only real decisions are what will survive the journey and what has to go in the hold rather than your hand luggage.

One structural oddity shapes everything on this page, and it catches almost every British visitor out. The Canary Islands are part of Spain and part of the European Union, but they sit outside the EU's VAT area and outside its customs union for excise purposes. That is why they have their own low sales tax, IGIC, instead of Spanish VAT, and it is also why the islands run duty-free shops that mainland Spanish airports do not. Practically, it means a flight home from Tenerife is treated more like a flight from outside the EU than a flight from Málaga, and allowances apply accordingly. Our page on duty-free and what you can bring home goes into this properly, and the IGIC explainer covers the tax itself. The figures themselves change, so check HMRC's own published allowances before you buy — that is the only source worth relying on, and it is free to look up.

With that settled, here is what is actually worth the luggage space.

Mojo: the obvious one, bought properly

Mojo is the sauce that defines Canarian food — red (rojo or picón, with paprika and chilli) and green (verde, with coriander or parsley). Every supermarket and souvenir shop sells it. Buy the versions with the shortest ingredient list; the cheap tourist jars are heavy on vinegar and light on everything else, and a good one will list garlic, oil, paprika, cumin and vinegar and little more.

The practical point: mojo comes in glass jars, which are liquid for security purposes and heavy. A jar over 100 ml cannot go in hand luggage. If you are travelling with cabin baggage only, look for the flat foil sachets sold in most island supermarkets — still over the limit individually in some cases, so check, but a far better bet is simply to buy the small 100 ml jars sold specifically for this reason. Otherwise, wrap the jars in clothing, put them in the hold, and accept that one in twenty journeys ends in a paprika-coloured suitcase.

Gofio

Gofio, the toasted grain flour that fed the islands for centuries, is the cheapest and lightest souvenir on the list and the one most likely to confuse people at home. A kilo bag costs very little, weighs almost nothing relative to its usefulness, and keeps for months in a sealed container. Stir it into milk, into soup, into yoghurt, or use it as a nutty flour in baking.

Buy the one marked Gofio Canario, which is a protected designation, and note whether it is de millo (maize), de trigo (wheat) or a blend — this matters both for taste and for anyone avoiding gluten. Paper bags split in transit; decant into a freezer bag before packing.

Miel de palma

Palm honey is La Gomera's great product and it is not honey at all — it is the sap of the Canary palm, tapped from the crown of a living tree and reduced over heat to a dark, faintly smoky syrup somewhere between treacle and maple. Almost nobody in Britain has tasted it, which makes it the best gift on this list. It is sold in glass bottles; the same hand-luggage rules apply. Pour it over ice cream, cheese or pancakes.

Buy it on La Gomera if you are going — the roadside stalls around Vallehermoso and in San Sebastián sell it fresher and cheaper than the resorts — but it is widely available on all the islands.

Cheese: what travels and what does not

Canarian cheeses are seriously good and badly known abroad. Majorero, the Fuerteventura goat cheese, holds a protected designation and has won world championships; Palmero is smoked over almond shells and fig wood; queso de flor from Gran Canaria is curdled with thistle flowers rather than rennet.

For travel, the rules are simple. A hard or semi-cured cheese, vacuum-packed at the counter, survives a flight in the hold without complaint and will keep for weeks. Ask for it al vacío — any market stall or supermarket counter will do it while you wait. A fresh queso tierno will not survive and should be eaten on the island. Cheese in hand luggage is allowed as a solid, but soft cheese has been treated as a liquid by some security staff, so put it in the hold if it is remotely spreadable. Since the islands are treated as outside the EU for these purposes, there are limits on how much dairy and meat you may bring into Great Britain — look them up on gov.uk rather than guessing, because the rules for animal products have changed more than once in recent years.

The same caution applies to chorizo de Teror, the soft spreadable sausage from Teror on Gran Canaria. It is superb, it vacuum-packs well, and it is a meat product with its own import rules. Check before you buy a kilo of it.

Wine

Canary wine is the connoisseur's souvenir here. The islands' vines survived the phylloxera outbreak that flattened European vineyards, so some of the rootstock is ancient and the grape varieties — listán negro, listán blanco, negramoll, malvasía volcánica — are found almost nowhere else. Production is small and very little reaches British shelves.

Buy from a bodega if you can. The volcanic vineyards of La Geria on Lanzarote sell direct and are worth visiting for the landscape alone; the Tenerife wine villages and the guachinches of the northern slopes sell their own bottles. Wine must go in the hold or be bought airside. A cardboard wine box from a supermarket is the cheapest reliable protection; specialist wine skins are better.

Rum and ron miel

Ron miel — honey rum — is the bottle most people take home, and it costs a fraction of what a comparable liqueur costs in Britain. The islands' rum history is genuine rather than manufactured: sugar cane was planted here in the fifteenth century, made the early colony rich, and although the industry collapsed when Caribbean sugar undercut it, the cane and the stills remained. The Arehucas distillery at Arucas on Gran Canaria runs tours and sells at the door.

Spirits go in the hold or are bought after security. If you buy airside on the outbound leg of a connecting journey, keep the sealed bag and the receipt, or you may have it confiscated at the transfer airport.

The smaller things worth a corner of the case

What not to bother with

The tourist-shop gift packs of miniature mojo bottles cost several times what a full jar costs in a supermarket and taste worse. Fresh fruit and fresh fish are subject to import restrictions and will not survive anyway. Fresh cheese, as above, does not travel. And the bottles of "Canarian banana liqueur" in fluorescent colours on the souvenir shelves are almost entirely sugar.

Where to buy

In rough order of value: a village market stall, a supermarket, a specialist food shop in a city, a producer's own door, and finally the airport, which is the most expensive of the five and also the most convenient. The island markets have set days and the good ones are worth planning around — Teguise on Lanzarote on Sunday, Teror on Gran Canaria on Sunday, and a dozen smaller ones. Shopping in general on the islands covers the non-food side and the duty-free question from the retail end.

Before you pack

Weigh the case. Glass is heavy, and three jars of mojo, a bottle of wine and a bottle of rum will add close to five kilos before the cheese. Liquids over 100 ml go in the hold or are bought after security. Solid food — gofio, cheese, sweets, salt, spice mixes — can travel in the cabin. And check the current allowances on gov.uk before you commit to a case full of bottles; what you can bring home explains how the islands' odd status works, but the numbers themselves are HMRC's to publish and they do change.

If you want to be sure of what you are buying before you buy it, the overview of Canarian cooking is the place to start, and the menu vocabulary doubles as a shopping list.