Palm sugar
Sweetener
Top 10 pairings
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.
Picking a good onedrag
Hard, glossy, caramel-deepFizzing, fuzzy, off
Open and in useEveryday bestKeep the cut disc wrapped tight and the paste lidded. The working sugar: Thai curries and dipping sauces, sambals, kuih, brown-sugar baking.
Colour through a broken faceAlmost black and dense - a sugar or palmyra palm, boiled long over a hot wood fire
Press a disc, or the pasteGlassy-hard with no give at all - a long boil, and it wants a hot knife or melting
Smell the broken faceMalty, earthy, a whisper of bitterness behind the caramel - the darkest blocks
Read the labelCoconut-palm sugar: the same tapped flower sap, paler and milder than sugar or palmyra palm