Ingredients · Fruit

Tamarind

Tamarindus indica · Fabaceae (pea family)

Tamarind
A sour-sweet, date-like pulp with a faint caramel depth — the souring agent for half the tropics. Two products carry it. Tamarind does what lemon does in European cooking, but with body and sweetness behind the acid, which is why it thickens a sauce where lemon would only sharpen it. Worth checking on the label: powdered tamarind is sometimes carried on maltodextrin or sugar, and our spec does not say.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partFruit
KindFruit
CaffeineCaffeine-free
Where it is fromAfrica (native), India (long naturalised)
TasteSour-sweet, fruity and date-like with a faint caramel depth

How to use it

Dissolve the powder in warm water before adding. In pad thai, sambar, rasam, sinigang, chutney and agua de tamarindo. In curry pastes and marinades. It is sour and sweet at once, so it often replaces both lemon and a little sugar.

With food

Fish and prawns. Lentils and chickpeas. Palm sugar and jaggery. Chile. Ginger. Peanut. Coconut. Beef.

With spices

Chile and cumin. Coriander seed. Fenugreek and mustard seed, in sambar. Ginger. Star anise.

With tea

Not a tea ingredient, though tamarind is drunk as a cold infusion across Mexico and the Levant.

Its story

Where it comes from

Native to the drier savannas of tropical Africa — from Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania west through sub-Sahelian Africa to Senegal. It reached South Asia several thousand years ago and took so well that it has often been reported as native there. Spanish and Portuguese colonists brought it to Mexico and Central America in the sixteenth century, possibly across the Pacific on the Manila galleons — the first American reference is from Acapulco in 1615.

What happened

The name carries the trade route inside it: Arabs called it tamr hindi, the date of India, for the date-like dried pulp — though the tree is African. Marco Polo records a darker use: pirates in Gujarat forced captured merchants to swallow tamarind mixed with seawater as a purge, to recover swallowed pearls. In Tamil Nadu it makes puliyodarai, tamarind rice, offered as prasadam in most South Indian temples; inscriptions naming puli amadu are found in the Big Temple at Thanjavur, whose kitchens have been working since April 1010. And it is in Worcestershire sauce: John Wheeley Lea and William Henry Perrins, chemists of 68 Broad Street, Worcester, began making it commercially in 1837, and tamarind extract is in the original nineteenth-century ingredient list — found in a skip at the factory in 2009.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

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