Skip to main content
Sauce

Tamarind and Green Ginger

A spicy tamarind and green ginger sauce with salt, chillies, mustard seed, and ghee.

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

Why it works: Ginger and tamarind 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 and Green Ginger

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scrape the rind off the green ginger.

  2. Pound the ginger and tamarind pulp together or grind them on a stone.

  3. Add the coarse sea salt, pounded chillies, and roasted mustard seed to the mixture, then mix all ingredients well.

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. Ginger + tamarindtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

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

  2. Tamarind + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Ginger + mustardtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Ginger + gheetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together988 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Tamarind + gheetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Tamarind pulp
Provides the sour, tangy acidity that defines the sauce.
Green ginger
Adds sharp, fresh aromatic pungency.
Pounded chillies
Adds direct heat to the sauce.
Roasted mustard seed
Adds a pungent, toasty aroma and bite.
Ghee
Adds richness and carries the aromatic flavours through the sauce.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Carrotfits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Mustardthe original
  4. Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, tamarind, ghee. 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 recipesMixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes