Coconut sugar

I thought palm sugar and coconut sugar were the same thing. Wrong! They are cousins, but the coconut sugar and the nicer cousin, gentler, with more personality and easier on the system. When I visited a coconut farm in Ban Prok in Thailand, I had the opportunity to see each step of the production process. Here’s how it goes: the coconut flower is tied, a piece is cut at the end, and a bottle attached. The sweet juice drips into the bottle, which is changed twice a day, and another inch is cut at the end of the long flower. About 1L of juice is collected each day and one flower lasts about a month. Then the juice is cooked until it becomes a thick and sticky caramel sauce, which is then dried.

When compared to the regular white sugar, the coconut variety has a nicer and more complex flavour, pleasant to the palate. It has a bit lower glycemic index, so the sugar spike is not as sharp. It also contains many nutrients, such as iron, zinc, calcium, potassium, polyphenols, and antioxidants. In spite of some claims that is it diabetes friendly, it still is a sugar, but it is less harsh it definitely is less processed, and it tastes good.