Material
Palm Sugar & Jam
Sugar that tastes faintly of smoke, cooked slowly into small batches.
Budi Santoso, Pastry chefYogyakarta, Indonesia
Budi Santoso was judging a village food fair when a tapper offered a taste of sugar still warm from the wok. It was dark, soft, and tasted of caramel and woodsmoke.
Budi asked where to buy more. The answer was: from the tree, every morning.
“I had used white sugar for twenty years. One spoonful of this and I could not go back.”
Palm sugar comes from the sap of coconut flowers, collected twice a day by tappers who climb the trees, then boiled down over wood fires.
The trees keep producing for decades and need no replanting.
The jam uses palm sugar instead of refined sugar, cooked in small copper pans so the fruit keeps its shape.
The smoke is subtle, but you notice when it is gone.