From: sbhattac@rnd.GBA.NYU.EDU (Shankar Bhattacharyya)
Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking
Subject: Re: Tamarinds ?
Date: 6 Nov 92 05:07:39 GMT
Distribution: rec
Organization: NYU Stern School of Business

In article <1992Nov5.235134.10307@news.columbia.edu> nsh3@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Nadine S Harris) writes:

>In article <1992Nov5.184525.12569@math.utexas.edu>
>sedgwick@rene.ma.utexas.edu (Eric D. Sedgwick) writes:
>
>>I wanted to do some cooking with tamarinds so I bought some
>>beans.  Now I Notice That The Recipes I Have (Sauces And The like
>>) are for tamarind paste, of which I have none. Can I make paste
>>out of the beans ?    

>Sorry.  Tamarind is a fruit.  It is very pulpy and stringy--
>absolute hell to work with.  
>
>A friend who is a caterer and has a diploma from the Culinary
>Institute, where they must learn to do absolute everything by hand,
>insisted on trying to make tamarind recipes by using the fruit itself,
>picking all the bits of pulp out with her fingers.  She's pretty
>indomitable, but even she gave up, chalked it up to experience and
>still gets shivers when someone says the word, "tamarind."

Ah. And I get mildly misty.

Radhika has already provided an obviously authoritative account of how to
deal with tamarinds. I will ramble about other stuff for a bit. Nobody will
learn anything about how to use tamarinds in cooking. I don't have anything
to contribute along those lines. Sorry about that.

Tamarinds are pods, like large, plump, Lima beans. A tamarind pod could be
a foot long, and more than half an inch across. That's pretty large,
though.

The ripe fruit is encased in a brown shell, with a brown pulp inside, with
flat brown seeds encased in a much lighter, almost white membrane. The
shell of the ripe fruit is hard, thin, brittle, and inedible. The shell of
the unripe fruit is green (as is the interior) and almost like a skin
rather than a shell, and you can bite through it, and eat it. *Very*
unripe tamarinds are uninteresting.

The pods have a string down each side, like beans. In fairly unripe
tamarinds the strings are barely there, and you can eat the pod as is,
spitting just the seeds out as you go. The ripe fruit has pretty tough
strings.

When recipes refer to tamarinds, they mean the ripe fruit. Tamarind paste
is more convenient, but by the time a fruit has been reduced to pulp,
thickened to paste, packed in bottles, and so on and so forth, it ain't the
same. It is obvious that it came from a tamarind, but that's about all you
can say for it.

You can express the pulp from the fruit, with not a whole lot of
water, so that you get a sort of thinnish paste, but that is a fair bit
of work. I just use lemon juice instead, and surrender the essence of
tamarind. That's life. Applesauce is a far cry from apples, too.

No offense to the people at the Culinary Institute, but folks from 45
degrees north of the equator are culturally disadvantaged in this regard,
I'm afraid.

Tamarind trees can be pretty large. Kids wander around during tamarind
season, catapult in hand, to shoot the pods off the tree. Really virtuous
kids can knock the pods off with a stone or two thrown by hand. When I was
a kid we had to identify the pod we were going to knock off; trees can be
pretty heavily burdened.  After that, of course, we argued for the rest of
the day about whether the one we had knocked off the tree was indeed the
one we had said we would bring down. And we punctuated sentences by
spitting a seed out every now and then. For distance.

Excessively adventurous kids will climb a tree. That can be a major pain.
The trees have thorns. One tends not to do that very often, depending on
how rapidly one learns from experience. I learned quickly. One trip,
exactly.

Tamarind pickle is very typical of eastern India. Darned if I know how
to make it, though. Nor can you buy it, as far as I know. Terrific stuff.
I am nursing a bottle a niece gave me a couple of years ago. Lots of good
mustard oil, some red pepper, this and that.

Wimps make pickle with just the pulp. Real People leave the membranes in.

- Shankar
Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking