Skip to content

Recipes with palm jaggery

3 recipes that use palm jaggery, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Thala guli, takes 20 minutes. It is most often cooked with cardamom, butter and coconut.

Run out of palm jaggery? Dark brown or muscovado sugar, same amount.

Got a few things in the fridge? Search by everything you have

Alle belle

Alle belle are the tea-time sweet of Goan Catholic homes: soft, lacy pancakes, sometimes tinted with a little green from pandan or turmeric leaf, rolled up around a sticky filling of fresh coconut and dark palm jaggery (godd). They appear at feast-day teas, at village fairs and in school tiffin boxes, and they contain egg in the batter. The common mistake is a thick batter, which gives heavy pancakes that crack when rolled; it should pour like single cream and spread thinly with a swirl of the pan. Chef's tip: cook the filling until it is sticky but still soft, then add a pinch of salt, because the salt makes the palm jaggery taste richer.

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Athirasa

Athirasa, a dark, flat disc with a shiny, slightly crinkled surface, is one of the keeping sweets of the Avurudu season: families fry stacks of them in early April, store them in tins and offer them to every visitor for weeks. The dough is simply rice flour stirred into jaggery syrup cooked to the soft-ball stage, flavoured with cardamom and left to rest, then patted into rounds and fried until deep brown. The cook presses each one firmly between two flat spoons or saucers to squeeze out excess oil, which gives athirasa its chewy, toffee-like centre and lacy, crisp edges. The typical slip is undercooking the syrup, which makes the dough too soft to shape and causes the rounds to fall apart in the oil. Chef's tip: shape the discs on a piece of oiled banana leaf or baking paper and slide them straight into the oil from it, so they keep a neat round shape.

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Thala guli

Small boutique shops all over Sri Lanka hang strings of thala guli by the till, each ball wrapped in a twist of coloured paper, and children spend their coins on them on the way home from school. They also have a place on the Avurudu table and at almsgivings, as sesame is considered an auspicious, strengthening food. Toasted sesame seeds are pounded with jaggery and a pinch of salt until the oil comes out and the mixture holds together, then rolled into little balls that are rich, nutty, slightly bitter and sweet. No cooking beyond toasting is needed, so they take barely twenty minutes. Under-toasting the seeds is the trap: pale seeds taste raw and will not release enough oil to bind, so roast until they pop and turn evenly golden. Chef's tip: pound while the seeds are still warm, when they give up their oil easily; a food processor in short pulses works too.

by KrazyBadal 0 views

Goes well with palm jaggery