STAR INGREDIENT
Used in south-east Asian and Indian cooking, and giving Worcestershire sauce its familiar tang, it adds a depth of flavour to these new recipes
Diana Henry gives a taste of tangy tamarind
There are two options. One looks like a block of compressed dates, dark brown with a matt surface. The other is almost frightening, like a small sticky fibrous animal, lying in a hunched curve in a plastic bag – my first encounter with tamarind. It’s 1985 and I’m on one of my excursions to stock up on ‘exotic ingredients’. It seems a strange term now (and a strange thing to do). There was no internet so all the foods I needed for dishes from Asia, Africa or the Middle East had to be tracked down. I would set off with a list of addresses, an A-Z of London and a big basket. When I got home I would unwrap packets, sniff the ingredients (dried shrimp paste was the only one that made me recoil) and put everything carefully on the ‘exotic’ shelf in my kitchen. Although I was shopping for it, I had no idea what tamarind was. Charmaine Solomon’s The Complete Asian Cookbook just told me I needed it.
Nowadays, tamarind still isn’t regarded as an everyday ingredient but it’s much easier to find (supermarkets even sell own-brand jars of tamarind paste). If you prefer to get your hands dirty, you can still buy it in blocks (it’s just compressed tamarind pulp with the seeds removed). To use it, break off a nugget, put it in a little boiling water, press with a wooden spoon to help extract the flavour, strain and use. You can even find tamarind in the pods in which it grows – they look like beige knobbly beans – though then you have to deal with the fibres and seeds. Tamarind is a souring agent; you’ll often be told that lemon juice is a substitute, but that’s like saying you can use lime juice instead of pomegranate molasses. Tamarind isn’t just sour; it’s also slightly sweet and definitely fruity. It tastes a little of dates (it’s sometimes called ‘the date of India’ and I’ve also heard it referred to as the love-child of lemon and caramel). Lemon is the ingredient I couldn’t do without. With tamarind you don’t just get sourness but depth as well. It has acidic top notes and lower sweet notes. Like lemon it can ‘lift’ dishes and pull disparate elements together, but it also rounds and softens. If you recognise that cooking is often about the layering of flavour, you’ll understand just how useful tamarind can be. It’s used in the cooking of Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Asia, but I find it useful in dishes from other countries too. Tamarind isn’t just an ‘exotic’ food but an important ingredient in the cook’s toolbox.