T-Chow also have a tamarind pork. It's like small bits of ribs, which is difficult to eat, but if we could recreate that with the same flavour profile that could be cool. It's kind of a sweet and sour taste with tamarind base, a bit of spice.
On their menu it's "Pork Spare Ribs with Tamarind Sauce", on the top banquet, and the delivery listing calls it tender ribs in a tangy tamarind sauce. Their recipe isn't published, so this is not theirs. It's the flavour, rebuilt around a cut you can eat with chopsticks: pork scotch, the marbled neck, cut across the grain into rib-sized pieces. It stays juicy where loin goes dry, and there's no bone to chase.
It isn't generic sweet and sour. There's no pineapple, no capsicum, no ketchup, and nothing glows red. The sour is tamarind from the block, with a little black vinegar behind it. The sweet is palm sugar. Fish sauce brings the salt, and dried chilli, ginger and white pepper the bit of heat.
It went through the full three-way blind review (Claude, Grok and Codex) in October 2026. The first draft lost its ketchup, its five-spice and its overnight marinade, and the pork got recut across the grain. The last round tested caramelising the palm sugar first, against just dissolving it into the tamarind. Both other judges picked the plain one: palm sugar already tastes of toffee, and taking it darker only adds bitterness on top of the tamarind. None of it has been cooked in this exact form yet.
The air fryer does the frying here, on the Crispi. The Next Level is the restaurant way, twice through hot oil.
