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Drink

Tamarinds Water

A beverage made by boiling tamarinds in water, then cooling and optionally sweetening with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Tamarind and sugar work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 362 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Tamarinds Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the tamarinds in boiling water for one hour.

  2. Cool the mixture.

  3. Sweeten with sugar if desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Tamarind + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together362 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tamarinds
Their acidic pulp gives the water its sour, tangy flavour as it softens and dissolves.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sourness of the tamarind.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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