Homemade Restaurant-Style Tamarind Chutney Recipe (video)

[Saviolo]

The last two videos have been about making samosas, and this week we're making a dip for those samosas! This is that really delicious savoury, sweet, zingy, slightly spicy tamarind chutney you usually get at nice Indian restaurants with your samosas. It should technically be a bit lighter in colour (more red!), but our tamarind was a little old and oxidized, so it came out quite dark. It didn't really affect the flavour at all, and the dip was delicious.

You definitely want to run this through a strainer. Even the "deseeded" tamarind paste usually has seeds in it, and little bits of date skin will also clump up, and you want the final product to be nice and smooth. Remember the scrape down the outside of your strainer! We used brown sugar in this, but jaggery is more traditional for this dish, if you can get your hands on it. You can control the levels of heat in this, too. We used a somewhat mild fermented hot sauce for this, but you can use a spicier sauce, or more of it. Be careful with prepared sauces like Frank's Red Hot or Tabasco, because they have a lot of vinegar in them which will change your flavour profile.

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[Kali]

1. I love tamarind.

your sauce looks good. I have never had that and the only samosas available around here are frozen.

[Saviolo]

2. That's a shame!

But now you've got all the instructions to make your own at home And the only thing that's super hard to track down is the tamarind paste, though you can get it through Amazon or other online retailers. You could probably get jaggery that way, too, but we found that brown sugar made a very suitable replacement.

[Kali]

3. I can get the pods at the Mexican groceries in Tucson

(and honestly there are at least 3 or 4 Indian restaurants in town, I just need to go) but I don't really know how to process them. I had a big bag of them at one time but they got buggy. I was going to make tamarindo agua fresca and never did it.

tamarind-chile candy (almost a fruit leather) used to be pretty popular even at walmart, I wonder if that would work?

[Saviolo]

4. Apparently you can make your own tamarind paste.

From My Pocket Kitchen:

Pour boiling water over tamarind, smash up a bit with a spoon and let soak for 20-30 minutes. Place in a colander and push pulp through with a spatula or spoon, scraping the bottom of the colander from time to time, until only the fibers remain and you have about 2 cups of thick tamarind paste.