Simple is often the most sublime. A pitcher of freshly made “tamarindo” or ripe tamarind juice/infusion was just terrific! I had the same “aha!” reaction to this juice as I had when I first tried santol juice, here. the tamarind juice was so incredibly simple to make, and it upsets me no end that it isn’t more commonly available. It’s easier to find 52 brands of crappy high fructose juice drinks than this simple, natural, seasonal juice. If I find a Cebu supplier of tamarind, we will definitely introduce this on our menu on a seasonal basis, the same way we have santol and duhat concoctions in season…

After I made some tamarind puree, here, I had a whole jumble of seeds and pulp leftover in the sieve. It seemed a waste to throw it out, so I let it steep in some water and strained it again. I ended up with a cloudy, tart broth. To this, I added some puree and mixed it well. Add some simple sugar syrup to get it to the level of tartness/sweetness you prefer. That’s what’s in the pitcher in the photo above.

Add some water and LOTS of ice cubes and serve cold. If you have never tasted this before, and are a fan of tamarind, you will be pleasantly surprised. I LOVED it! So fresh, light, natural and a real thirst quencher. Though I gather from previous reader comments that it acts as a mild laxative, so you may want to limit your intake to a glass or two at any one time… :)

Mrs. MM went the next step, and tried to make a tamarind shake. Technically a smoothie, we just made a more strongly flavored tamarind base, ramped up the sugar syrup as the cold ice numbs your palate, added lots of ice and blitzed it until a thick and smoothie like. Delicious. A bit one dimensional, like I was thinking a bit of lemongrass or some other foil might be nice, but still refreshing, unusual and delicious.

And what tree was some 10 meters behind our kitchen while we were fooling around with all this tamarind? Of course a mature samaplok or tamarind tree that had LOTS of ripe fruit hanging off its branches… Hmmm, need to harvest that bounty… :)

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Armed with 2 kilos of peeled ripe tamarind, at just PHP30 per kilo, it was time for a few experiments. I had little or no access to the web while at the beach, and had no previous experience with cooking ripe tamarind, so I decided to wing it, and if all failed, I wouldn’t feel bad about the monetary expense. The crew helped me peel off the stems and large veins from the ripe sampalok, then I placed it in a pot and covered it with water.

Put the pot over medium high heat and bring the water to a boil and lower heat to a steady simmer. I mashed the sampalok a bit, but after a few minutes realized it was disintegrating on its own. Tasted the water and my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets from the intense sourness of the broth, so I added a cup or two of sugar and let it simmer for another few minutes. It was still incredibly sour, and I decided I was going to make my own sampalok puree for use in roasted chickens, and additions to other cooked dishes, so I figured it had to be redolent with flavor, but not overly tart that it would be an unwelcome addition to other experiments. So I added another cup or two of sugar. So perhaps 4 cups of sugar to 1 kilo of sampalok and several cups of water.

Without much of a wait, the sampalok, water and sugar turned into this beautiful mass, it smelled wonderful and tasted so intensely of tamarind, but sweetened. I knew instinctively at this point this was going to be a really good thing. I realize this may seem really common or mundane to some of you familiar with cooking ripe tamarinds, but to me, this was a whole new food experience, incredibly unique and exciting.

I strained the solids out (the seeds and the tough layer around the seeds) and ended up with this fabulous medium viscosity puree. Had I added a bit more sugar and kept stirring over a medium flame, I would have ended up with jam. But instead, I decided to work with the puree. I ended up with roughly 5-6 cups of puree and stuck 3 cups in the freezer, and noticed the next day that it didn’t freeze up… cool. Must have been the high acidity/high sugar content of the puree.

It seemed a waste to throw out the solids that still had lots of stuff attached to it, so I added some hot water, let it all swim together and strained out the solids again, ending up with a tart/sweet tamarind broth or liquid. That’s what’s in the pitcher on the left of the photo above. It would be turned into a FANTASTIC drink, up next. Meanwhile, I was wondering what to do with my newly created bounty of sampalok puree… Stay tuned for more on the sampalok adventures. :)

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It isn’t that often that I find ingredients at my regular market haunts that I haven’t seen before, or have written about, for that matter. You tend to fall into a comfortable routine, like hitting favorite seafood vendors, buying my sea salt from Manang X, and purchasing ripe saba bananas in the fruit section whenever I visit the Nasugbu town market. But last weekend, I spotted some brown stuff inside a plastic bag and realized it was a huge clump of ripe and peeled tamarind fruit. Sampalok candies were my all-time favorite childhood sweet, along with my favorite champoy or kiamoy as my savory snack. I LOVE SAMPALOK candies and still do to this day, though I have to admit I eat a lot less of them due to the apparent amounts of sugar they possess. I almost always take a little packet of sampalok and champoy with me on long plane trips, I find the sharp flavors and sugar/salt are good quick pick me ups. At any rate, I had NEVER really made or thought to make them from scratch. It just seemed so much easier to buy them for such reasonable sums of money.

Without a clue what to do with the sampalok, and perhaps invisibly guided by a reader comment requesting a recipe for tamarind jam a few days ago, and bizarrely, comments left by sister on the blog (about our grandmother making a mean sampalok jam) at the same time I was at the market shopping, I think the planets aligned to guide me to the pile of ripe tamarind. At PHP30 a kilo, I thought it was a supreme steal, and bought 2 kilos on the spot. The lady selling them said they were supplied by a lady up in “the bukid” or mountains nearby. She had picked them, peeled them and walked them several kilometers down to the main road and eventually to the market. Egads, had I met the supplier, I would have paid her double for all her trouble. I can’t imagine what kind of patience and lack of any other thing to do is required to sit down and peel hundreds of these tamarind pods.

Previous posts on sampaloc:

Bomba Sampalok
Sweet Thai Sampalok in its shell
Sampaloc/Sampalok
Sampalok candy from Thailand

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