Dulce de Tamarindo

Mexico's sweet-sour-spicy tamarind confection: the pulp cooked down with sugar and worked with chilli and salt, rolled into balls and crusted in chilli sugar

Origin: Mexico

From the journey of Tamarind.

No country has taken the sweet-sour-spicy combination further than Mexico, and no ingredient suits it better than the tamarind. Dulces de tamarindo, in a hundred commercial and homemade forms, are amongst the most distinctive sweets in the world: the dark, sour pulp cooked with sugar and then worked with chilli powder and salt into a chewy confection that hits sour, sweet, salty, and hot all at once. They are sold everywhere, as the soft pressed bars called pulparindo, as tamarindo enchilado rolled in chilli sugar, as sticky pulp packed into little clay pots or lollipops, and as the thick chilli-tamarind sauces that Mexicans pour over fresh fruit, crisps, and the rims of drinks. The lineage is significant: it is from these Mexican chilli-tamarind sweets that the whole modern chamoy-and-Tajín flavour family descends, now found across the Americas and increasingly beyond. Made at home the sweet is simple and satisfying, and it shows the tamarind at its most characteristically Mexican: not softened into blandness by the sugar, but sharpened and complicated by salt and chilli into something that makes the mouth water and the hand reach for another.

Ingredients

Sweet

300 g tamarind pulp, seeded (from about 500 g pods, or block tamarind)
250 g sugar
100 ml water
2 tsp chilli powder (ancho or piquín), or to taste
1.5 tsp salt

Coating

60 g sugar mixed with 2 tsp chilli powder and 1 tsp salt, for rolling

Method

If using pods, peel away the shells and fibres. Soak the pulp in the water for 20 minutes, then work it hard with your hands and push it through a sieve, discarding the seeds and fibre, to give a thick, smooth tamarind paste.
Put the tamarind paste, the 250 g sugar, the chilli powder, and the salt in a heavy pan and cook over a medium-low heat, stirring constantly, for 15 to 20 minutes, until the mixture darkens, thickens, and pulls away from the sides of the pan in a mass.
Turn the mixture out onto a plate or tray and leave until cool enough to handle, but still warm and pliable.
Mix the coating sugar with its chilli powder and salt. Pinch off pieces of the warm paste, roll them into small balls, and roll each in the chilli sugar to coat.
Leave the sweets to firm at room temperature for at least an hour, then store in an airtight container with a little more chilli sugar dusted between the layers.

Notes

The heat is entirely to taste and Mexican versions run from mild to genuinely fierce; piquín gives a sharp, clean heat and ancho a milder, fruitier one. For a softer, more chewy sweet cook the paste a little less; for a firmer one, a little more. The same paste, loosened with water and a squeeze of lime, becomes a chamoy-style sauce for drizzling over mango, jícama, cucumber, and crisps, and thinned further it makes the base of a tamarind michelada.

The Gastrographer

Name: Dulce de Tamarindo
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 1 h 30 min
Yield: 24
Cuisine: Mexico
Ingredients: 300 g tamarind pulp, seeded (from about 500 g pods, or block tamarind); 250 g sugar; 100 ml water; 2 tsp chilli powder (ancho or piquín), or to taste; 1.5 tsp salt; 60 g sugar mixed with 2 tsp chilli powder and 1 tsp salt, for rolling

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control