Tamarind

• imliइमली

  Hindi

• puli

  Tamil

• makham

  Thai

• tamarindo

  Spanish

• tamr hindi

  Arabic

  Literally "Indian date", which is where the English name comes from.

Sharply sour with a real fruity sweetness behind it and a faint bitterness at the end. The combination is what makes it hard to replace: most souring agents deliver acidity alone, and tamarind delivers acidity attached to a dark, raisin-and-molasses body that reads as depth rather than as sharpness.

Fruity and slightly winey, with a dried-date sweetness and a distinct sour edge. Much less volatile than an aromatic spice — tamarind announces itself on the tongue rather than in the air.

Mid to dark brown as pulp, deepening almost to black as concentrate. Colour tracks both ripeness and processing, and a very dark product is usually a reduced one rather than an old one.

Sticky and dense as pulp, syrupy as concentrate. Strained tamarind water is thin and slightly cloudy, and carries fine solids that settle.

• Tartaric acid — The dominant acid and the source of the sourness, present at levels far above most fruit. It is also what distinguishes tamarind from citrus souring, which is dominated by citric acid and reads brighter and less rounded.
• Sugars — Present in substantial quantity alongside the acid. The simultaneous high sugar and high acid is the whole sensory signature, and the reason a sour tamarind sauce still tastes rich.
• Pectin and fibre — Gives body to a sauce made with tamarind water, and is why a tamarind-thickened dish has a texture that lime juice cannot supply.

Establish the strength of what you have before anything else, because the four commercial forms differ by several-fold and no label distinguishes them reliably: taste a little on a spoon, and if it is the dark syrupy concentrate, assume it is four times as strong as the recipe expects. For block, break off a piece roughly the size of a walnut, cover it with hot water for twenty minutes, work it apart with your fingers and push it through a sieve, discarding the seeds and fibre. Add the resulting liquid early — tamarind is one of the very few flavourings here that gains from long cooking rather than losing to it, because its character is acid and sugar rather than volatile oil. Balance it: tamarind is sour enough that most dishes using it also carry sugar or jaggery, and a dish that tastes harshly sour usually needs sweetness rather than less tamarind.

Sambar, rasam and South Indian fish and vegetable dishes, pad thai and Southeast Asian sour soups, Malay and Indonesian fish dishes and curry pastes, imli chutney for chaat and samosas, Mexican aguas frescas and candy, and Worcestershire sauce. It works with lentils, fish, prawns, okra, aubergine, pork, jaggery, dates, coconut and tomato, and alongside chilli, mustard seed, curry leaf, fenugreek, coriander seed, ginger and garlic.

• infusing — The standard preparation for block tamarind, and an infusion in the literal sense: the flavour is extracted into water and the solids are thrown away. Hot water softens the pulp so it can be worked with the fingers and pushed through a sieve, separating the usable pulp from seed and fibre. Twenty minutes in hot water does what an hour in cold does.
• boiling — Tamarind holds up to long cooking better than almost any other flavouring here, because its character is acid and sugar rather than volatile oil. Simmering concentrates it and deepens the fruitiness. It is added early to sambar and to braises without loss.
• frying — Not fried directly — the sugar content burns. Tamarind goes into a dish as a liquid, after the fat-based stages are done.
• grinding — Ground into wet spice pastes in Thai and Malay cooking, where it contributes sourness and helps bind the paste. Not ground dry.

Taste it, and taste it every time regardless of age. This is not really a freshness test — tamarind rarely goes stale in the way a ground spice does — but a strength test, and it is the single most useful habit with this ingredient, because the form and the brand determine the dose far more than the age does.

• Surface mould on a block kept damp
• A fermented or alcoholic smell from an opened jar
• A flat, merely sour taste with none of the fruitiness left

• Moisture uptake at the surface of block tamarind, leading to stickiness and eventually to surface mould
• Drying and hardening of block stored too warm, which makes it harder to soak but does not spoil it
• Slow darkening and flavour flattening of opened paste and concentrate

Buy the seedless block if you cook with tamarind regularly. It is inexpensive, it keeps for a year or more, it tastes better than concentrate, and the twenty minutes of soaking and sieving can be done once for a month if you freeze the strained water in cubes. Concentrate is worth keeping as well for the days when twenty minutes is not available — just treat it as a different ingredient and start at a quarter of the quantity. What is not worth buying is a small expensive jar of thin sweetened paste from a supermarket, which is the most costly and least useful form of all three.

• Know which form you are buying: wet block, seedless block, jarred paste or concentrate. The packaging often does not say clearly, and the strength difference between the extremes is several-fold.
• Block that is pliable rather than rock-hard, and dark brown rather than pale.
• For paste and concentrate, a short ingredient list — tamarind and water, without added sugar or acid.
• Bought from a South Asian or Southeast Asian grocer, where the block forms are cheap and the turnover is high.

There is no consumer grade and, more importantly, no declared strength. Commercial specification covers seed and fibre content, moisture and acidity, none of which reaches the label. Concentrates are reduced to different degrees by different producers and none of them say by how much.

Fabaceae

A large, long-lived tropical tree reaching twenty metres or more, with fine pinnate foliage and hanging brown pods some ten to fifteen centimetres long. The pods contain a sticky brown pulp around several hard seeds, held together by tough fibres.

Tropical Africa, despite the species name and despite India being where the fruit became culinarily central. It was carried to South Asia early enough that its arrival is not recorded, and to the Americas by the Atlantic trade.

• India — major producer. The largest producer and by a wide margin the largest consumer.
• Thailand — major producer
• Mexico — notable producer
• Indonesia — notable producer
• Sudan — notable producer

Pods picked when fully mature, when the shell has become brittle and the pulp inside has darkened and softened. Immature pods are green, hard and far more acidic.

1. Shelling — The brittle outer shell cracked away from the pulp.
2. Deseeding and defibring — Seeds and the tough fibrous strands removed, wholly or partly depending on the product being made.Why: This step is what separates wet block from seedless block, and it is the main determinant of price.
3. Pressing or blocking — Pulp compressed into blocks, or wet-milled and strained into a paste.
4. Concentration — For concentrate, the strained pulp is boiled down to a dark syrup, often several-fold.Why: Produces a shelf-stable, strongly sour product — and the one most often used at the wrong dose, because nothing on the jar says how far it was reduced.

Commercially specified by form, seed and fibre content, moisture and acidity. There is no consumer-facing grade, and — importantly — no standard statement of strength, which is why the four forms cannot be substituted by measure.

The recorded risks are dilution of paste and concentrate with water, sugar or other fruit pulp, and the sale of underprocessed block as seedless. Concentrates in particular vary enormously between brands without any of that variation being declared.

Grown as a long-lived tree crop, often in gardens, along roadsides and on field margins rather than in dedicated orchards. A substantial share of the harvest comes from scattered trees rather than from plantations.

A tropical and subtropical tree, drought-tolerant once established and intolerant of frost. It grows readily in semi-arid conditions where more demanding fruit crops fail, which is much of why it is so widespread.

African in origin and carried east into South Asia early enough that classical Indian sources treat it as native, then west into the Americas with the Atlantic trade. The Latin name records a misunderstanding: tamr hindi, the Arabic for Indian date, describes where Arab traders met it rather than where it came from.

Traded as a bulk food commodity rather than as a luxury spice, and one of the few flavourings that moved successfully in both directions — eastward to Asia in antiquity and westward to the Caribbean and Mexico in the early modern period, becoming culinarily central in both.

Long documented traditional use as a laxative and a cooling remedy across South Asian, African and Caribbean traditions. Recorded as documented tradition. SpiceHQ holds no clinical source for tamarind and makes no health claim about it.