The Tamarind Connection: What a Bottle of Spicy Tequila Taught Me About Two Cuisines That Already Knew Each Other
The Tamarind Connection On Bad Bull, imli, and the ingredient that crossed every ocean before we did. Someone handed me a bottle of Bad Bull Spicy Tamarindo tequila at a gathering, and my first instinct was not to think about Mexico. It was to think about imli. Imli. The sticky, sour, deeply savory paste my mother kept in a steel dabba in the refrigerator. The base of every chutney worth eating. The thing that makes pani puri water taste like itself and nothing else. Tamarind is so embedded in South Asian cooking that it almost disappears — it is the background note you do not notice until it is gone. And here it was, on a bottle of agave tequila made in Mexico, labeled sweet and spicy, doing exactly what tamarind always does: making everything around it taste more like itself. The Bad Bull Spicy Tamarindo is technically a flavored tequila spirit — tequila and grain neutral spirits with natural flavors, the label reads, 60 proof. It i...
