That’s pretty much pure tamarind and has a far stronger tamarind flavour. You can buy tamarind concentrate or tamarind paste. You can get a block of tamarind and make it yourself. There are different tamarind products out there. I don’t like to call out product names if I can avoid it. Tamarind sauce is not the same as tamarind paste If you don’t want to get tamarind sauce use a bit of sugar and fresh lemon juice. Don’t worry – it will still qualify as Indian restaurant dhansak curry. The sweet and sour notes come from tamarind sauce. They disappear into the sauce but they bring body and smoothness. The lentils are cooked until they disintegrate. It’s also really good done the Indian restaurant dhansak curry way. It’s a wonderful dish done the original way. My guess is this dish started out as a way to stretch a relatively rare and expensive ingredient – meat – with plentiful and cheap lentils. Don’t mean to oversimplify but immigration is good for food. Little bit of history. The Parsis were from Persia and migrated to India to escape persecution in or around the 10th century. Dhansak gets it roots from Persian cuisine But the big flavours, lentils and a bit of sweet and sour remain. Tamarind is a key ingredient in authentic Pad Thai, but people often use rice vinegar or lime juice as a replacement - but get in there with some softened tamarind and you’ll never look back.Dhansak is a famous Parsi dish. Indian restaurant dhansak curry is adapted from the traditional. Of course, wherever you are, the tamarind elevates all those amazing ingredients and adds a level of background sweetness too, supporting the naturally delicate flavour of seafood - prawns are a match made in heaven for this sort of sauce. Tamarind, fresh coconut, ginger, garlic and chilli harmonise together in south Indian cuisine to create a rich, fragrant and sweat-inducing flavour profile, which is said to help cool you down in the hot temperatures. Add it into your coconut-based seafood curries And the block, when stored in a cool, dark place in an airtight container will last indefinitely, so what’s not to love? Once you’ve got your paste sorted, then, here are some ideas from around the world to start you off on your tamarind journey. But you’ll be richly rewarded for doing this - the fresh, tangy sweetness from the pressed tamarind will beat a jar of sugary paste any day. Tamarind in its pressed, brick-like format needs some preparation before you can use it in your cooking: you’ll need to tear off however much of it you want, soak it in boiling water to soften and then push it through a sieve to get rid of any stringy fibres. Yutthana Chumkhot / EyeEm // Getty Images How do you use tamarind? If you’re after a deliciously tart snack, do buy a package of the seed pods and greedily suck the pulp off them while you watch your favourite Netflix show - but if you’re after using it in your cooking, you're better off buying the tamarind brick than either the pods or the pastes the former are too fiddly to cook with in large quantities and the latter can often have sugar or artificial ingredients added to them which deviate away from tamarind’s natural fruitiness. Many South Asian shops will stock either the whole ripened seed pods, or condensed bricks of the tacky, date-like flesh - some will possibly carry tins or jars of tamarind paste concentrate too. The sticky brown pulp which surrounds these seeds is what we refer to as tamarind, and the sweetness of the pulp, like lots of fruit, is dependent on its ripeness. The fruiting body of the tamarind tree is a long-ish seed-pod, containing between 6-10 thumb-sized seeds. But what actually is tamarind? How can you use it in your cooking at home? What is tamarind? Tamarind’s signature acidity comes from a high level of tartaric acid, but it also boasts a unique caramel-y stickiness which makes it a wonderful ingredient in its own right, especially in chutneys. But across the rest of the world (and by no means limited to the tropical regions in which it grows) tamarind is used in drinks, sauces, marinades and curries to boost the acidity of a dish while adding a complex fruity flavour. Even if you’ve never cooked with tamarind, you’ll probably have it hiding in your kitchen already - it’s found in Western cuisine as an ingredient in both HP sauce and Worcester sauce, sending in its flamboyant tang to dance with all that marvellous umami.
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