Tamarind is one of our favourite ingredients. Its taste is hard to describe â it has a sweet-sour flavour that adds a completely distinct tartness to sauces, soups, marinades, pastes and dressings. Itâs an ingredient we use lots throughout the book in a number of savoury fish and vegetarian dishes, as well in the sweet dish of Roasted pineapple (page 260).
Here, its tartness is a key part of the rasam soup which is often served in South Indian cooking to balance the heat of other dishes. Rasam translates as âessenceâ. The soup can be made in many ways â with varying contributions from tomato, pepper, lemon, cumin, chilli and tamarind water â but the result will always be food that comforts and restores. As with the Halibut and vichyssoise (page 118), our version is a meal in itself, somewhere between a hearty soup and a fish dish with a sauce.
We use five different spices when making rasam at NOPI, instead of the garam masala mix here. If you want to reinstate the original , use 1 teaspoon each of black pepper, cumin, coriander, caraway and yellow mustard seeds.
30g | ghee |
6 | sea bass fillets (840g), skin lightly scored |
1 tbsp | lemon juice |
10g | coriander leaves (optional) |
coarse sea salt and black pepper | |
1 tsp | ground turmeric |
2 | medium tomatoes (170g), halved, seeds removed and roughly chopped (100g) |
10g | unsalted butter |
Rasam | |
100g | tamarind pulp |
1 tbsp | sunflower oil |
2 | medium onions, thinly sliced (200g) |
8 | garlic cloves, crushed |
1½ tbsp | garam masala |
12 | stems fresh curry leaves (25g) |
2 | large dried red chillies |
3 | large tomatoes (300g), each cut into 6 wedges, 2cm wide |
Potatoes | |
620g | Desiree potatoes (or a firm, waxy variety), peeled and cut into 2½ cm cubes |
15g | ghee |
8 | stems fresh curry leaves (20g) |
1½ tbsp | yellow mustard seeds |
1 | medium onion, finely diced (100g) |
4 | garlic cloves, finely diced |
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