Food

Embellish Every Morsel: Tamarind Chutney (Condiments)

Lesson time 11:55 min

An Indian meal is not complete without embellishments. Madhur shows you how to turn a block of dried tamarind into a delectable tamarind chutney. She also shows you how to make cauliflower pickle, chili pickle, and classic cucumber raita.

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Topics include: Tamarind Paste · Tamarind Chutney · A Wedding Treat

Madhur Jaffrey

Teaches Indian Cooking

7x James Beard Award winner Madhur Jaffrey teaches you 30 authentic recipes and shares India’s vast culinary traditions and techniques.

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] - When we sit down to eat an Indian meal, we have our main dishes, which maybe cauliflower, or a meat dish, or a potato dish, but it's never enough. We need our embellishments. So every morsel has scope for excitement and newness as you put it into your mouth. So I am going to devote this chapter to telling you a little bit about all the other things that we have to have as a meal beside the main dishes. Pickles is one of them. Now, we all make our own pickles, and if we don't, we buy them. The market is filled with Indian pickles. Now, this is a cauliflower pickle that is sweet and sour. They're all different from each other, and the sweetness comes from gur, or raw brown sugar in India. Here, I use brown sugar, and then there are mustard seeds and all kinds of other spices that go into the making of this particular pickle. This is another pickle that I've only had in my family, which is basically just green chilies. There's ginger in it. There's mustard seed, crushed mustard seeds, and those form this particular chili pickle, which is much loved in my home. Now raitas. Raita is a yogurt relish of various kinds. What you do is take yogurt, just beat it up lightly, and then you put anything in it that you want. So there are all kinds of relishes. You can put almost anything in yogurt and have it as a relish. We like to have that with our meals. And then, of course, there are the fresh chutneys, like chutneys made with mint and green coriander. And here is a chutney that is made with green coriander, and we would love to have that on the side on our plate. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how to make a very important chutney that has been very important in my life. It was at every wedding we had this chutney, and my grandmother made it all the time. So we had it in our house, and that is tamarind chutney. Let me show you what tamarind is. We had a big tamarind tree in our house, and we always had our own tamarin. First they're green, and we used to, as children, love to eat them green, and this is what a tamarind looks like when it's ripe. This is the outer skin. It gets hard as it ripens, and if you break it, this comes off, the skin. The hard skin comes off, and inside-- oh, my God. Even now, I can't resist. I just want to break this off and put it in my mouth, because I love eating the tamarind just by itself. So now what happens with tamarind is that they take out the seeds from these kind of tamarinds and then they put them in a block, and you can buy the blocks in an Indian grocery store. So this is what the blocks look like. They look like this. So what are you looking for when you're buying a block of tamarind. Usually, there are two types of blocks that are available. There is the Thai tamarind. It's a little lighter in color. And so this is the darker tamarind that you get. When you buy it, make sure that the packet is flexible. So you have a piece that I'...

About the Instructor

With more than 30 award-winning cookbooks and a James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame Award, Madhur Jaffrey may be the greatest living authority on Indian cuisine. Now she shares those vast and storied traditions with you. Learn 30 authentic recipes: vegetables, breads, South Asian meats, street foods, and more. Blend and layer spices and bring it all together—from the perfect bite to full menus of vibrant flavor.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Madhur Jaffrey

7x James Beard Award winner Madhur Jaffrey teaches you 30 authentic recipes and shares India’s vast culinary traditions and techniques.

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