Jaggery
Sweet Tradition (India’s traditional sweetener)
The sweet smell of boiling sugarcane juice mingled with smoke, is so much a part of the Indian countryside during the winter months in just about all the regions growing sugarcane. Jaggery making is perhaps the largest of the small scale industries in the country and India is possibly the world’s largest producer and consumer of jaggery or Gur as it is popularly known.
The process of making Gur starts with the crushing of the sugarcane to extract the juice between two vertical rollers.
This collects in a large concrete tank from where it flows into the first of 3 large metal pans placed over a long deep pit that has a huge bagasse fuelled fire burning. (bagasse is the fibrous residue left after the juice has been extracted from the cane) It is all a wonderfully coordinated process from this point onwards.
Traditionally gur is made without adding any chemicals for clarification. Instead, a sticky solution is made from the juice of the stems of wild okra (Lady’s Finger) locally called SUKHLAI (Abelmoschus Manihot) which is added to the boiling cane juice. This helps to congeal and bring up the impurities that are present in the form of particulate matter and is skimmed off using large ladles.
This process is continued even after the boiling juice is transferred into the second pan where it is boiled at an even higher temperature. As more of the impurities are removed, it starts to change colour and assume a golden hue.
Stirred continuously to prevent it congealing or burning, the very hot liquid is then transferred to the hottest of the three pans.
When it reaches the consistency of a thick syrup and just as it starts to congeal, the very hot liquid is poured with much dexterity onto a large concrete platform. Here, skilled workers continuously turn the golden molten jaggery with large paddle-like spatulas till it cools off, and can be shaped into round balls, or flat blocks or broken down into powder form.
Watching the final stages of the gur making process is mesmerizing.