Cendol

Cendol is the beloved iced sweet of Southeast Asia: a glass of shaved or crushed ice flooded with cool coconut milk and dark palm-sugar syrup, studded with soft, worm-like strands of green rice-flour jelly. It is at once a drink you sip through a wide straw and a dessert you spoon up, cold and creamy and frankly sweet, with a caramel depth from the gula melaka palm sugar and a faint grassy fragrance of pandan in the jelly. Sold from hawker carts and roadside stalls from Malaysia and Singapore to Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and beyond, it is the quintessential tropical cooler — non-alcoholic, caffeine-free, and one of the region's most iconic street foods.