Palm sugar is an unrefined brown sweetener made by boiling down the sweet sap tapped from the cut flower stalks of various sugar-bearing palms — most often the sugar palm (Arenga pinnata), the palmyra (Borassus flabellifer), the wild date palm (Phoenix sylvestris) or the coconut palm. Known across Southeast Asia as gula and in Thailand as nam tan pip, it sets into dense golden-to-mahogany blocks, discs or paste with a deep caramel-toffee, faintly smoky flavour, and is a cornerstone sweetener of Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, Indian and Filipino cooking.