The Fruit Explorer Encounters Tamarind, Part 2 of 3

(Continued from Part  1)

The Plant

The tamarind is a tree in the pea family that is indigenous to tropical Africa. It was introduced into India so long ago that it is sometimes erroneously thought that it is indigenous to India, which is now the world's largest producer. The tree, which can grow as tall as a hundred feet, is perhaps the most widely grown tropical fruit tree. A University of Florida site describes the tamarind in the following way.

A handsome, short-trunked tree with a spreading frame of branches, the tamarind tree has a great dome-shaped crown of airy, graceful leaves. The tamarind tree is long-lived, sometimes still productive after 200 years. This tropical tree is drought-resistant and flourishes in sandy, rocky, and poor-quality soils. The tree's strong, supple branches are little affected by high winds. Clusters of pale yellow veined blossoms turn into long, flat rust-colored pods that are usually slightly curved. The pods are usually 3 to 8 inches in length, and may contain as many as 12 seeds. Mature trees are capable of producing up to 350 pounds of fruit a year.

Here are some tamarind pictures from the Internet.

• A full-grown tree. 
• Four pictures that show the leaves at decreasing distances. At night the leaves close up.
• Two pictures that show flowering tamarind trees. The flowers, which are about an inch wide, are yellow with orange or red streaks. The sepals are red but are shed when the flower opens. (Sepals are the outer covering of the flower bud.)
• Three close-ups of tamarind flowers. Note that they do not look like standard pea flowers.
• Honeybee on a tamarind flower.
• Three pictures of tamarind fruit on a tree. The fruit was well known to the Greeks and Egyptians in the 4th century B.C.
• Tamarind seedling.

                                          

The tamarind tree is usually propagated from seed, which will remain viable for months and will sprout a week after planting.

(Continued in Part  3)

The Fruit Explorer Encounters Tamarind, Part 3 of 3

(Continued from Part  2)

The Eating

Not only had I never had tamarind but had also never even seen one. I was surprised to see that they looked like large, coarse, brown beans, but this made sense when I learned that the tamarind is in the pea family and saw that the leaves were typical pea family leaves. Here are pictures of my tamarinds.

• All of my tamarinds gathered on a plate.
• Five tamarinds on my cutting board to show variation.
• A close-up of one tamarind. The next five pictures show what happened to this tamarind as I ate it.
• A close-up of a tamarind with the shell broken in one place. To shell the tamarind, you crack it much like a peanut. It is easier to deal with than a peanut; since the shell is thinner and more brittle, it easily cracks apart.
• A close-up of a tamarind with the shell removed.  it does take some care to remove all the little shell fragments, which stick to the fruit. You can see the little strings that run down the length of the fruit. I don't know what the strings are or what function they perform.
• A close up of the tamarind fruit once it is peeled and ready to eat.
• The strings after they are removed from the fruit.
• The seeds. Each little lump in the fruit contains a seed, which you need to spit out. It is easy to deal with these seeds; you are in no danger of swallowing them or damaging your teeth on them. A seed that comes out of your mouth is dull and gooey. Once you rinse it, however, it takes on an appealing gloss and is a suitable component of fruit art.

                        

Now for the taste test. I separated two lumps of fruit from a tamarind and popped them into my mouth. The texture screamed, "Date!" since it was thick and gooey. ("Tamarind" comes from the Arabic, tamar hindi, which means Indian date.) The taste, however, was nothing like the extreme sweetness of dates (28 Dec 2014). The Internet experts had prepared me for a sweet-and-sour taste, but at first I could detect no taste at all. I tried some more, concentrated, and after considerable chewing was finally able to detect a very faint taste, so faint that I can't describe it. I suspect that my tamarinds were below average in potency. 

To give my tamarinds a second chance, later I ate some right after working out. The thinking is that after working out I am at my hungriest and food tastes the best.The result was almost the same. The only change was that the faint taste that emerged after lengthy chewing had a slight suggestion of raisin; this taste was so faint that it could only be perceived by a hungry person who was concentrating intensely on the taste.

The verdict, based on this unreliably small sample, is that the tamarind is a fruit for one who likes the texture of dates but not the sweetness.

Use of the Tamarind Plant

A University of Florida site describes the use of the tamarind fruit.

Tamarinds may be eaten either at the green immature stage or when the shell pod has become brittle and the interior pulp has turned brown. In the American tropics, tamarind pulp is commonly used with sugar and water to prepare a cool, refreshing beverage. In Asia, grated green tamarinds are often mixed with hot peppers and salt and eaten as a salad. When separated from the shell and seeds, the mature, brown sticky pulp can be prepared to season meats and chutney. Tamarind paste is one of the essential ingredients in the popular Worcestershire sauce. And in some countries it is used as a mild laxative.

A Huffington Post article from 2014 asks the penetrating question, "What the Hell is Tamarind, Anyway?"  It motivates this question in the following way:

And if you're wondering why you really need to expand your knowledge of tamarind, look no further than chef Yotam Ottolenghi -- pretty much the "it" chef for all things vegetarian right now, as far as we're concerned. Ottolenghi uses tamarind paste in everything; it's one of his "secret" ingredients. If that's not reason enough to get to know tamarind, we don't know what is. [Link omitted]

Here is how to follow in the steps of the "it" chef and make your own tamarind paste (or concentrate or extract).

The best way to enjoy the pulp is to make a flavorful concentrate. Discard the seeds from the pulp. Soak the pulp in very hot water and cover for several hours or overnight. With a slotted spoon, scoop the pulp out of the water. Using a fine strainer, press out all the juice from the pulp. Use the strained pulp in recipes calling for tamarind extract or paste.

If you don't want to make your own, you can order from Amazon. Also, add sugar to the liquid produced by this process to obtain tamarind juice, or you can buy it. 

   

   

To learn about the culinary uses of tamarind, see this site. The quick summary of this lengthy discussion is that tamarind is used for just about everything. For those on a budget, a cooking tip is to take advantage of tamarind's acidity by using it to tenderize cheap cuts of meat.

Unusually for a fruit, tamarind is high in calcium.

In Madagascar the ring-tailed lemurs prize tamarind fruit and leaves, and over the course of the year tamarind might provide fifty percent of their diet. Black headed orioles also feast on tamarind trees.

   

Tamarind wood is dense, durable, and red or a dark purplish-brown, and it is often used in furniture and flooring since it takes a good polish; see below. (The hollow that you see in the first picture is typical of the center of a tamarind tree.) Tamarind wood is also used for sculpture; see the carved bird below, which is part of a project to carve 100 birds from 100 different woods..

   

Tamarind is the basis of a raft of cosmetics, one of which is shown below.

In Africa, tamarind fruit is used to dye goat hides. See this site for many additional commercial uses of tamarind, e.g., using the seeds in brick-making.

The tamarind tree is host to the lac insect Kerria lacca, which deposits a resin on the twigs that can be used to produce lacquers and varnishes.

A Purdue site describes superstitions that involve the tamarind.

Few plants will survive beneath a tamarind tree and there is a superstition that it is harmful to sleep or to tie a horse beneath one, probably because of the corrosive effect that fallen leaves have on fabrics in damp weather. Some African tribes venerate the tamarind tree as sacred. To certain Burmese, the tree represents the dwelling-place of the rain god and some hold the belief that the tree raises the temperature in its immediate vicinity. Hindus may marry a tamarind tree to a mango tree before eating the fruits of the latter. In Nyasaland, tamarind bark soaked with corn is given to domestic fowl in the belief that, if they stray or are stolen, it will cause them to return home. In Malaya, a little tamarind and coconut milk is placed in the mouth of an infant at birth, and the bark and fruit are given to elephants to make them wise.

Party Tip

Your party tip is to enable your guests to make tamarind candy. In short, you make tamarind paste as described above, mix it with sugar and spices, and mold it into the desired shape. Show your guests this video, which demonstrates the fine points. Provide a sauce pan, a stove, sugar, spices, and turn your guests loose. Some will be content to mold tamarind candy into the traditional balls (see picture below), but others will refuse to limit themselves to this pedestrian shape and will take advantage of the fact that tamarind candy can be molded into any shape. Provide an array of cookie cutters for those guests who want to make reindeer and stars. Be prepared, however, for guests who are willing to go freestyle, and who might create Donald Trump's hair, a replica of the Santa Maria, the silhouette of Alfred Hitchcock, the Statue of Liberty, or a model of the Death Star. Sympathize with your artists as they watch helplessly while their creations are consumed by the philistines among the guests.

Travel Tip

Your travel tip is to visit the Chinese village of Laideng, the location of a 1600 year old tamarind tree known as the "Tamarind King." It takes a chain of six adults to encircle the Tamarind King. Once the chain is in place, make a wish, and the Tamarind King will grant it as long as it is not a selfish wish. The picture below shows a tamarind sculpture at the entrance to Laideng, which has been designated as a special tourist village in Yunnan province. (From the ladder, the lone workman, and the numerous supervisors standing around, I infer that this sculpture is in the process of being put into place. When it is in its final location, perhaps the protective scaffolding will be removed.) If you are the kind who wants to see every attraction, while in Laideng you will want to take in the impressive vistas of the muddy waters of the Bijiang River; see picture below. I am unable to tell if those are tamarind trees along the river. Be aware that daylight savings time is not observed in Liadeng. 

   

Rick

The Fruit Explorer Investigates Other Fruit Explorers

To All,

I googled "Fruit Explorer" to see what other fruit explorers are out there and got 16.4 million hits. Below are the highlights that I gleaned from the first twelve pages. (I am somewhere in those 16.4 million hits, though I do not appear on the first twelve pages. I can confidently say that I appear somewhere because I googled "The Fruit Explorer Tips His Hat to Chiquita Banana" and got 21,800 hits, with the very first one being my blog post of that name.)

Weird Fruit Explorer

In the e-mail of 15 Sep 2014 I reported that I had discovered a YouTube personality called the Weird Fruit Explorer. At that time, he had made 56 videos; currently, he is up to 103. Here is his description of his mission.

My name is Jared Rydelek. For a living I am a contortionist, fire eater and sword swallower; naturally, it gets boring. So I have taken up the hobby of traveling the world to try and find weird things to do and eat. On my channel I will be posting videos reviewing exotic fruit and the weirdest places I can find.

Why fruit? Finding exotic fruit that is unavailable to the rest of the world is a bit like a treasure hunt. Finding something I never knew existed is a thrilling experience whether or not the fruit actually tastes good. Some of the fruits I find are tasty, some are disgusting, some are dangerous to eat, but all of them are interesting.

Why strange places? Well, the world is full of amazing sites that few people, even travelers, get to see. The biggest reason is my own desire of wanting to have my mind blown by new and interesting things in the world. But I also hope that these videos will encourage people to go on adventures and see more of this great world.

I have only watched a small portion of one of his videos since I did not want to be influenced by his approach or content. From that tiny peek, however, it looks like what he does is very different from what I do. In particular, I looked at the list of fruits that he has covered, and they are mainly fruits that are not available to me in Boston grocery stores but that are available to him as he travels the world.

Take a look at his YouTube home page if you want to check out the competition.  This is just for your information; I give no positive or negative recommendation. Please do not tell me anything about him or his videos.

Amazing Fruit Explorer

You can purchase a game for your iPhone called the Amazing Fruit Explorer. Here is a description and pictures.

Travel along with the Magic Fruits to Five different Worlds: Fruits, Diamond, Bubble, Gem and Birds, to explore different wonders and secrets of each world. Along the way you can experience one of the most addictive game play ever created. Once you start the journey you can't stop until you explore all the places in the maps.

   

Dora the Fruit Explorer

The cartoon character Dora the Explorer, though a broad gauge explorer, does do some fruit exploration to guide younger eaters through the jungle of fruit and teach them to eat processed fruit snacks instead of the real thing.

360 Degree Fruit Explorer

On this site you can rotate the picture of a fruit through 360 degrees so you can see what it looks like from any angle. This site also tells you how to eat the fruit and what it tastes like as well as fun facts about each fruit. In addition, this site has episodes of the series, "The Fruit Hunters." This series is produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and narrated by the Indiana Jones of fruit. In the picture below of the Indiana Jones of fruit, how many of the fruits can you identify? I can only spot jackfruit, dragon fruit, and star fruit (and plantains?). I think we need the Weird Fruit Explorer to identify more.

North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX)

This organization describes itself in the following way.

The North American Fruit Explorers (NAFEX) is a network of individuals throughout the United States and Canada devoted to the discovery, cultivation and appreciation of superior varieties of fruits and nuts.

Founded in 1967 by a small group of pomological hobbyists, NAFEX has grown to an organization of more than 3,000 members, and is chartered as a nonprofit organization in the state of Illinois. Although the ranks of our membership include professional pomologists, nurserymen, and commercial orchardists, NAFEX members are all AMATEURS in the truest sense of the word; they are motivated by their LOVE of fine fruit. NAFEX members typically work together to help each other by sharing ideas, information, experiences, and propagating material.

This organization goes on to describe its mission as: "To aid and encourage fruit exploration in its broadest context." For general information, see this site. You might want to attend the annual meeting.

North American Fruit Explorer's Southern Fruit Fellowship

On 5-6 Oct 2015 the North American Fruit Explorer's Southern Fruit Fellowship will meet in conjunction with the Texas Fruit Conference in College Station, TX. Fruit tree grafting will be a focus of these meetings. Don't miss out on the good fellowship. To keep out the riffraff, registration is $80. (For those of you who are not Southern Baptists, I should explain that "fellowship" means that you get together with others and have a good time in an informal setting, e.g., at a church supper.)

PDX Fruit Explorers

This company in Oregon City, OR, allows you to sign up for a box of fruit every week from July 20 to November 21. The customer gets to explore the mystery box of fruit that arrives every week. One of the commercial endeavors of this company is to sell ugly but perfectly healthy fruit; see below. Perhaps Dave and Gwenie can check this out and report back to us. (Mike Breen contributes this story and video about how the French embrace ugly ("inglorious" they call it) fruit.)

   

The Great Fruit Adventure

Max MacGillivray bills himself as the Founder and Fruit Explorer at the Great Fruit Adventure. He apparently is a muckraker and activist concerned with fruit-related issues.

Joe Simcox, Fruit Explorer

The San Diego chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers Association chose as the theme of its 2015 annual meeting the possibility of growing healthy and delicious fruit in a time of drought. As their website states, "The main event will be on Saturday August 8, 2015 and will kick off with fruit explorer Joe Simcox in a keynote session on 'Uncommon fruit from dry regions of the world'."

Also, the 25th Annual Hawai'i International Tropical Fruit Conference to be held on 25-27 Sep 2015 will cover a wide range of fruits, including jackfruit. It advertises, "Other speakers and their topics include 'The Fruit Explorer' Joseph Simcox, who travels the globe searching, tasting and documenting thousands of edibles." I am starting to see that Mr. Simcox and I are going to have to fight it out for the title of "Fruit Explorer."

Grants for Fruit Explorers

The Helen and Paul Thomson Endowment gives grants to "...cutting edge fruit explorers who travel the world looking for different varieties of plants to introduce." Joe Simcox (see previous section) has received one of these grants, so it is possible to make a living from fruit exploring. 

USDA Hires Fruit Explorers

Another way to make a living as a fruit explorer is to get hired by the USDA to go looking for plants like the Nanking cherry (Prunus tomentosa), which bears on a single bush a crop of 15-25 pounds of small cherries about 1/4 of an inch in diameter; see the pictures below of a flowering bush and a close-up of a flower cluster. The activity of one fruit explorer is mentioned in the following quotation.

Visiting Manchuria in 1924, the U.S. Department of Agriculture fruit explorer Dr. George M. Darrow wrote that "in the rougher portions of Manchuria [the Nanking cherry] occurs only on hillsides where the bushes are usually three or four feet high and, in the early summer, are red from the abundance of fruit." [Interpolated material in original.]

(This paragraph is drawn from Lee Reich, Landscaping with Fruit: Strawberry ground covers, blueberry hedges, grape arbors, and 39 other luscious fruits to make your yard an edible paradise, Storey Publishing, 2009. The first sentence in this section is from p. 100, and the quotation is from p. 101. I had access to these page at this site. Amazon provides a different selection of pages.) Consider upgrading your yard by using the Nanking cherry as a highly decorative and productive hedge that provides beauty in three seasons.

If you are looking for a career change, consider getting hired as a USDA fruit explorer so you can scour the globe looking for the next Nanking cherry.

   

John Bunker, Fruit Explorer

From the Bangor Daily News, 6 Oct 2014, we find:

On Tuesday, October 7 at 6:30pm in the Belfast Free Library, apple expert and "fruit explorer" John Bunker will give a free presentation titled "In search of the oldest apples in Maine. What they teach us about the past, present and future." Bunker's presentation will cover the history of apples in Maine. He will describe his adventures tracking down, identifying and preserving rare historic varieties in Waldo County and elsewhere. Attendees who have their own apple trees are encouraged to bring fruit for identification.

Chris Rollins, Fruit Explorer

In the two-part article, "On to Borneo," that appeared in June and July 1994 issues of Tropical Fruit News, Chris Rollins, who is explicitly identified as a fruit explorer, points out one of the drawbacks of this pursuit: "Unfortunately, when you find fruits in the forest, it's pretty discouraging. There will be a 60-foot tree, and the first limb is 40 feet up." He also says that as he travels between the local markets in Borneo, the available fruits frequently change, thus indicating the riot of diversity in this tropical island..

Travel Tip

You doubtless are on fire to attend one of the fruit explorer meetings described above, maybe that of the North American Fruit Explorers, the North American Fruit Explorer's Southern Fruit Fellowship, the California Rare Fruit Growers Association, or the Hawai'i International Tropical Fruit Conference. It will be hard to choose from the galaxy of opportunities. You have missed this year's meetings, so you will need to watch for the dates and programs for next year so you can pick the most interesting. Think how you will enlarge your knowledge of fruit and of the fascinating fruit people you will meet.  Luxuriate in the midst of a sea of fruit enthusiasts. No more doubts over what type of vacation to take next year. Below is a picture of the location of the 2015 meeting of the North American Fruit Explorers.

Rick

The Fruit Explorer Creates Fruit Plates

To All,

Being an atrocious cook (even animals turn up their noses at some of my dishes), it's always a hassle to figure out what I can bring to a dinner other than black-eyed peas. With the advent of fruit exploring, however, a solution to this chronic problem presents itself--I bring a fruit plate. Here are some of the plates created by the Fruit Explorer in the role of culinary artiste.

The Fruit Explorer came out of the closet with his initial fruit plate for Thanksgiving 2014 at Pepe and Maria's. Since this was my first, I had not yet learned the virtue of simplicity; my fruit plate was so elaborate that I had to provide a map to keep from being pestered with questions about what the various fruits were. (I purchased the platter featured in the first picture at an antique store not far from Pepe and Maria's Lake House about fifteen years ago. Maria galvanized me into buying it when she said that if I didn't buy it, she would.)

   

My next outing was Neil Night, 2 Dec 2014. Striving for simplicity, I perhaps overdid it when I produced the kiwi plate shown below. I did tart the photo up a bit with tricky lighting. (The kiwis are resting on a plate that is part of a complete set of plates, dessert plates, saucers, and bowls that Mei-Mei that gave me when I moved into my current residence exactly forty years ago.)

Realizing that the pure kiwi plate had overdone the simplicity thing, I created a kiwi and navel orange plate for a dinner hosted by my neighbors Rob and Julee on 12 Dec 2014.

Still striving to find the right balance between simplicity and complexity I took a pomegranate, kiwi, and navel orange plate to Pepe and Maria's for New Years Eve 2014.

To allow a comparison of the nuances of four different oranges--large navel, mandarin, cara cara, and small navel--I provided a citrus taste test plate for puzzle night on 13 Mar 2015 at Pepe and Maria's. The fruit map below provides a guide to the oranges represented. The last picture shows the Fruit Explorer, Mike, and Pepe huddled around the fruit plate. In this last picture, to the right of the fruit plate is the fruit map, which is laid out close by for ready reference. In the foreground is some found art, namely Maria's fruit bowl, which appears in the picture by accident. (These three pictures were taken by Rik.)

Your party tip is in fact a series of tips about preparing and serving a fruit plate.

• Don't decide up front what fruits you want to include. Go to the store and see what looks good.
• Diversify your fruit plate. Not every guest will like every fruit, so give your guests some choice. Also, diversity of fruit gives you more artistic flexibility.
• Put some effort into presentation. Since this is a weak point of mine, I have nothing to say except that effort will be rewarded.
• Keeping in mind that the frame makes the picture, get yourself a nice platter to hold your fruit. Don't just dump the fruit into a dented tin pie pan that originally held a Mrs. Smith's frozen cherry pie.
• Just as Salvador Dali thought that any painting could be improved by adding some ants, I think that any fruit plate can be improved by sprinkling on some blueberries.
• Since your fruit plate is inherently a transient work of art, take a picture of it so that later you will be able to study it, compare it to other fruit plates, and critique it.
• If your fruit plate is at all complicated, prepare a map of the fruit and set it in plain site. This will allow you to avoid being put into a bad mood by having to answer the same questions over and over.
• If you serve your fruit plate before dinner when your guests are ravenous, they will devour it immediately. If you wait until after dinner when they are replete, they will only pick at it.

Rick