Jaggery & Mishri

Jaggery is sugar cane juice or palm sap boiled down in open pans until it sets, with the molasses left in. The result goes by many names: gur in North India and Pakistan, vellam in Tamil, bella in Kannada, sharkara in Malayalam and hakuru in Sri Lanka. It sits within the wider baking, sugar and desserts department, next to refined sugar.

Cane jaggery, or gur comes as blocks, balls and powder. It goes into sweet pongal, payasam, chikki, til ladoo, gur ka halwa and a pinch into sambar or Gujarati dal to round off the sourness. Desi shakkar is the same thing broken into a coarse powder, easy to spoon into chai or over hot roti with ghee.

Palm and kithul jaggery is made from the sap of the palmyra, coconut or kithul palm. It is darker, softer and more complex, with notes of treacle and smoke, and it is the sweetener of Jaffna and Sri Lankan sweets such as kavum, aluwa, pani pol and watalappan.

Mishri and sugar candy, called kalkandu in Tamil, is sugar slowly crystallised into clear lumps. It is offered as prasad, eaten with fennel seeds after meals and dissolved into kalkandu pongal. Block jaggery softens in warm, damp weather, so keep it in an airtight tin, and grate or pound it before measuring.