Tamarind Salt

[rhippens]

so i was at the bar last night and the bartender was mixing himself a bloody mary to snap out of a previous night's result. he said he once had the best bloody mary of his life that contained tamarind salt, apparently a mix of tamarind, peppers, etc. the guy that made it for him claimed the stuff was only made in el paso.

 

i searched online a bit and am wondering if he was telling the truth. i haven't found much unless of course i am calling it by the wrong name. so, has anyone ever heard of this mysterious stuff?

Edited March 28, 2010 by rhippens

[Kid Cid]

I have never heard of it before but I don't know of everything out there. Sounds custom to me.

[SheikYerbuti]

Kalustyan's has five pages of salts in their catalog, and I don't see it anywhere in there.

 

Of course, you could probably do a mock up of it using. . .I'm guessing, salt and ground tamarind.

[detlef]

Problem is, I've never seen tamarind in anything but paste form. It's a pulp. Not saying that it couldn't be dried and pulverized, just that I've never seen the product despite spending years combing the shelves of Asian groceries.

 

That said, I would imagine a reasonable facsimile could be made mixing ground sumac and salt. Not sumac as in the leaves that give you a rash a la poison oak but ground sumac berries, a middle eastern spice.

 

eta: Curious, I googled "ground tamarind". Initially surprised by the fact that it auto-filled in the search box and expecting to find that I'd been missing out on this product all along, the search, however, yielded links to the same sort of stuff I've seen all along, bricks of tamarind paste. Ground perhaps, but not ground in the manner that we tend to think of.

Edited March 29, 2010 by detlef