Elevate Your Indian Snacks with This Tamarind Chutney Recipe

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Cooking With Anadi

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About Sweet & Sour Tamarind Chutney

I’ve never had this Sweet & Sour Tamarind Chutney at home till I made it myself! Imli, or tamarind, chutney is going to enhance your favorite snacks to an entirely new level! Unlike the Mint & Cilantro Chutney, which my mom made at home quite often, this chutney sure was a special one. I loved it so much when I enjoyed lots of street dishes such as aloo chaat, but no one ever made it at home, which is too bad!

As with many restaurant delights, such as Butter Chicken and Paneer Makhani, that I loved replicating at home, I decided to make this street-side favorite at home to enjoy with my samosas!

Sweet & Sour Tamarind Chutney is perfect not only for samosas, but basically any Indian snack, such as chaats and pakoras. In fact, you could even serve this with your McAloo Tikki Burger as a nice dipping sauce!

I find this tamarind chutney totally underrated. Admittedly, I don’t make it often enough, but I really should make it more frequently because it is one of my favorite chutneys for sure! Perhaps it’s just a little bit messy, but you’ll see that the mess here is totally worth it!

Tips for Making a Great Chutney

• To avoid wasting any tamarind, use your hands to squeeze any remaining pulp through the sieve.
• Refrigerate the chutney before serving for the best texture and flavor.
• If you are able to find any Jaggery, that would be the best sweetener you can use for this chutney.

Tools Needed

• Mixing bowl
• Strainer
• Wooden spoon
• Nonstick pan
• Measuring spoons

Ingredients for Tamarind Chutney

• 1 block of dried tamarind, soaked in water for 5 hours to 24 hours. Naturally this is the most important ingredient in our chutney recipe! If you cannot find dried tamarind, use tamarind paste or tamarind concentrate. You may have to adjust the amount of brown sugar and spices based on
• Brown sugar: This makes our chutney sweet!
• Spices: Hing, ginger powder, and red chili powder. Red chili powder adds the little bit of spice and reddens the chutney slightly.
• Cumin seeds
• Oil, for cooking.
• Black salt

How to Make Tamarind Chutney

1. Squeeze the pulp of the tamarind in the bowl in which it was soaking in.
2. Strain the mixture to obtain a smooth paste. Transfer it onto a strainer and using the back of a spoon, extract the pulp into another bowl.
3. Heat a pan on medium heat and add oil and the cumin seeds. Let the cumin seeds crackle and add the hing.
4. Add the ground ginger and red chili powder and mix. Give the tamarind mixture a nice stir and add it into the pan. Cook for 2-3 minutes. As you cook it, the chutney will gradually become thicker.
5. Add in brown sugar, adjusting to your taste. It is recommended to start with less and add more if you want it to be sweeter. Then add black salt and let the mixture continue to cook for 4-5 minutes.

Storing Sweet & Sour Tamarind Chutney

Transfer the tamarind chutney into a glass jar or an airtight container and store in the refrigerator for up to a week. If you want to save the chutney for longer than that, you can transfer 2 to 3 tablespoons at a time in ice cube trays and freeze the chutney that way. Remove the ice cubes when needed and thaw in the refrigerator or at room temperature. Use the thawed chutney in 1 or 2 days.

Serving Suggestions for Tamarind Chutney

Sweet & Sour Tamarind Chutney is perfect for pretty much any Indian appetizer, snack or chaat! You can also use it as a dipping sauce. Check out these recipes that would pair perfectly with this tamarind chutney:

• McAloo Tikki Burger
• Fruit Chaat
• Air Fryer Aloo Puff Patty
• Aloo Samosa
• Paneer Jalfrezi Samosa
• Chicken Keema Samosa

Frequently Asked Questions

One Pan, a Strainer and No Pressure Cooker

Plenty of tamarind chutney recipes begin by softening the block in a pressure cooker to save time. This one never does. The dried tamarind simply sits in a bowl of water for anywhere from 5 to 24 hours until it is soft enough to squeeze, and the only heat it ever meets is a nonstick pan on medium: 2 to 3 minutes once the strained pulp goes in, then another 4 to 5 minutes after the brown sugar and black salt. There is no medium saucepan bubbling away for half an hour and nothing to blend. A mixing bowl, a strainer, a wooden spoon, measuring spoons and that single pan are the entire kit.

The spice list is just as short. Cumin seeds crackling in a teaspoon of oil, a pinch of hing, half a teaspoon of ginger powder, a quarter teaspoon of red chili powder, and black salt stirred in at the end. There are no cloves, no cardamom, no fennel seeds and no garam masala, which is what sets this apart from the heavily spiced saunth that comes in a jar. That quarter teaspoon of chili powder is the only source of heat in the whole batch, and the single pinch of hing does far more work than its size suggests.

Consistency, Sweetness and Spiciness: Cook It to Your Own Preferences

This is a chutney you finish by taste rather than by the clock. The consistency is entirely in your hands, because the mixture thickens gradually as it cooks. Take it off the heat early and you get a loose drizzle that runs happily over a plate of chaat; give it the full few minutes and it becomes thick enough to sit on a samosa without sliding away. Either one is correct, and the difference is a couple of minutes in the pan.

Sweetness works the same way. Add the brown sugar a little at a time rather than all at once. The recipe settles at about 3 tablespoons, but tamarind blocks vary in how sour they are, and it is far easier to sweeten a chutney gradually than to rescue one you have pushed too far. Spiciness is a matter of personal preference too: the quarter teaspoon of red chili powder is there as much for the reddish tint as for the gentle background warmth, so move it up or down freely. Once the chutney has cooled, a spell in the fridge genuinely improves it, and both the texture and the flavor settle.

Because it is a condiment rather than a dish, the numbers per serving stay small. The batch divides into roughly 16 servings at about 28 calories each, with around 7 grams of carbohydrate, 5 grams of sugar and effectively no fat.

Imli Chutney for Kachori, Pani Puri and Every Other Chaat

Imli chutney is what most people mean when they say the sweet chutney. Imli is simply the Hindi word for tamarind, so imli chutney and tamarind chutney are the same thing, and saunth is a third name for it. It belongs with fried snacks above all: spoon it over a cracked-open kachori so it soaks down into the filling, or pour it as one of the condiments for pani puri, alongside a green chutney and the spiced water. Wherever there is something crisp and salty, this is the sweet-sour counterweight it was made for.