As a lover of sour lemon and lime desserts, I’m always on the lookout for other ingredients to satisfy my tangy cravings. Rhubarb, passion fruit, gooseberry and red currant all visit my kitchen when they come into season. But only tamarind has permanently moved in.
Tamarind, specifically the paste, has taken up residence in my fridge door, where I can easily grab it to stir a tablespoon or two into stir-fries, soups, curries and chutneys — anywhere its fruitiness might brighten savory aromatics like garlic, ginger and chiles.
The tamarind paste adds verve to the sweetened condensed milk.CreditDavid Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Barrett Washburne.
It also works perfectly in desserts, especially creamy ones, where it adds characteristic verve to the richness of dairy. In this recipe, tamarind paste stands in for Key lime juice in a sweetened condensed milk-based pie with a crunchy graham cracker crust.
Like the citrus, tamarind’s sharpness cuts through the potentially cloying aspects of all the sugar. But where Key lime has floral, herbal notes to soften the acid, tamarind is heady with molasses and dried fruit, which I round out with a little orange juice for smoothness.
Plopped into a pie filling, the tamarind might be hard to place. If you didn’t know what kind of pie you were eating, you might think it was some combination of lemon, dried apples and dates, but zingier and more pungent. The graham cracker crust and fluffy whipped cream topping, however, make everything familiar. Bouncing from sweet to tart, it can be hard to stop eating once you start.
You can find tamarind throughout the year, which makes this an excellent, all seasons confection. In warmer weather, I like to bring it out after a simple dinner of grilled chicken or fish and vegetables. But on colder nights, it’s also just right after a cozy stew or braise, when a dense custard pie is exactly what your body demands.
Depending upon where you shop, the hardest thing about making this pie might be finding the tamarind paste. Otherwise the recipe is dead simple, and you can bake the pie up to three days in advance. Then just before serving, whip the cream, sweetening it just a bit, but not enough to interfere with the pucker-inducing sourness of the filling. Because puckering is part of the pleasure of this deeply creamy pie.