Post by feather on Sept 7, 2019 23:44:33 GMT
Tamarind is new to me. It is slightly sweet and it is sour. It's a bean, with seeds, in a pod, and the part that holds the seeds in place is brown and like a date paste. Tamarind is that brown sour paste with the seeds, pod, and fibers removed.
You can buy it in a block, tamarind wet seedless pulp, then make it into a paste.
It usually comes up in worcestershire sauce recipes and for brown sauce (HP sauce in the UK.)
Looks like this:
Here are more than a dozen recipes for tamarind vegetables, meats, combination dishes, drinks, tea.
To make the tamarind pulp into a paste or concentrate, the chips of seeds and the chips of shell and the fibrous parts need to be removed. The package is labeled wet tamarind seedless.
I had 2-14 oz blocks of pulp.
I added 4 cups of water.
Brought it to a boil, stirring and breaking up the thick gluey texture, to release the chips of shell and seeds and the fibrous parts.
It was much too thick to put through a metal strainer so I put it in my mill.
That took a lot of work, to power through with the shells and seed parts, to make the paste.
I was glad to be done with it, so I can use it in the next version of the brown sauce I'm going to can. The tamarind taste is quite pleasant, not overly sweet but good and sour. (I'm a fan of sour.) I'm definitely going to use tamarind in the future, now that I know what I'm doing.
If you stay with it, you can probably knock this out in an hour.