Skip to main content
Sauce

Tamarind Sauce for Roast Pork

A tamarind-based sauce for roast pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tamarind and ginger work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 325 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Tamarind Sauce for Roast Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the tamarind in cold water.

  2. Pound the green ginger.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the ginger, salt, and dry chillies to the boiling tamarind.

  2. Strain the mixture after boiling.

  3. Sweeten with sugar to taste.

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 + gingertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tamarind
Provides the sour, fruity acidity that defines the sauce.
Green ginger
Adds a sharp, aromatic warmth to the sauce.
Dry red chillies
Contribute heat and a pungent flavour to the sauce.
Sugar
Balances the sourness with sweetness.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tamarind, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Cuminfits about as well
  4. Turmericfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against tamarind, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Ginger SauceGinger Sauce12 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes