Cooking With Richard

I’ve cooked with this exotic Thai ingredient before, but never thought to taste it on its own, even less try it in its naked form. But this is what tamarind actually looks like:

The taste is sweet like figs, with a sour note.

A whole box of sweet tamarind pods cost me £1.89 from Oriental City in Colindale, surely a bargain considering that tamarind paste is an expensive luxury in supermarkets.

I have some potential recipes including sweet tamarind chutney and this site has several tamarind recipes.

Update: Sweet Tamarind Chutney

When the tamarind flesh is mixed with a little water, it dissolves into the familiar tamarind paste that you pay huge amounts of money for in the supermarket. Extracting the seeds is timeconsuming:

The recipe has a variety of spices, but none are strangers in the CookingWithRichard kitchen. However the smell of asafoetida while preparing reminds me of Jason’s socks. Nevertheless the resulting chutney is delicious:

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 5th, 2006 at 9:02 pm and is filed under photos, food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.