Palm sugar might be new to some readers, but it’s been steadily gaining in popularity in recent years. We love palm sugar so much that we’ve dedicated a whole singular flavor of ice cream to it.
Palm sugar is sugar made from the sap of a number of palm trees such as date, coconut, and a few others. Often, you will see a label noting which type of tree the palm sugar came from, but sometimes it doesn’t give you that information. Regardless, palm sugar is a nutrient-rich, low-glycemic sugar that looks, tastes, dissolves, and melts almost exactly like sugar, but it’s unrefined, which allows it to retain its unique taste, naturally occurring deep brown color, and host of vitamins and nutrients, including potassium, zinc, iron, and vitamins B1, B2, B3, and B6. That’s rare for sweeteners, most of which are highly refined.
Palm sugar, also known as jaggery, is produced in parts of Africa as well as Asia. The production is similar to that of maple sugar: A tree is tapped and the sap is collected before being boiled down to crystallize into sugar. You’ll often see palm sugar in funny little shapes, like swirly domes or blocks, but sometimes you’ll also see it “granulated,” much like regular table sugar. Palm sugar is perhaps most prominent in Southeast Asian cooking, but it’s becoming more and more popular in Western cooking, often replacing brown sugar, delivering richer caramel and butterscotch notes, minus the tinny flavor of the brown sugar.
We became a lot more familiar with palm sugar after Laura and Ben visited Bali. While there, they discovered a family-run farm, Big Tree Farms, that, in addition to being the world’s largest supplier of organic coconut palm sweeteners to the international market, also grows more than eighty different crops, ranging from Chioggia beets, vanilla beans, and passion fruit; harvests sea salt; and cultivates cacao plants.
We loved this sugar, with its deep caramel notes, and we loved the farm’s commitment to the environment, so we decided to make ice cream with it. Our Heritage Palm Sugar Ice Cream is not unlike caramel ice cream, except with deeper butterscotch notes.