• rss
  • mail
  • instagram
Pâticheri
  • What’s Pâticheri?
    • The Backdoor
  • My Research & Publications
  • Garden to Table
  • Flower Cookery
  • Stories
  • Subscribe
Garden to Table, Heirloom Recipes, Local Ingredients, Sweet Things, Vegan, Vegetarian  /  December 8, 2020

How to process a panampazham or toddy palm fruit

by Deepa

Do you find new fruits and vegetables to be somewhat intimidating because you don’t really know what to do with them? Here’s my tale of tackling this toddy palm fruit–a first for me, though I’ve seen it roasted and relished in village backyards.

Borassus flabellifer, toddy palm, palmyra, panampazham–we know this as the source of ice apples or “nungu” in the hotter weeks of the summer, just before mangoes arrive. We know it also as a source of jaggery that’s rich in healing properties (karupatti or panavellam), a naturally flavored candy that’s great to sweeten cough kashayams (panam-kalkandu), and perhaps as a source of toddy. The jaggerys and rock sugars are road-side offerings in rural areas; you’ll find them sold in charming cases fashioned out of the palmyra leaves themselves. Sometimes the jaggery comes pre-mixed with sukku (dry ginger) and pepper (milagu), so all you need is hot water and you have a throat-soothing drink in a capsule. The toddy is used to make appams or “kal dosas”–a fermentation starter, alongside coconut and is less easily available unless it’s sought out.

The ripe fruit comes much after the ice apples have hardened into seed; it is less used, less appreciated, less known, except as a village thing. But it is its own joy, releasing slightly fermented pulp that is bright orange, thick and creamy like the mango, with a mildly bitter aftertaste that gets muted by additions of rice, coconut, and jaggery.

The story goes something like this. Fruit falls—plop! Rescue from the bugs; it already has a scent that attracts them all. Pry off the flower-like top. Peel the beast. Fruit falls apart easily—tripartite.

Then begins the real work for the fibres don’t release their pulp without a fight, so one has to squeeze, massage, grate, comb, shave, beg-plead, getting a meager ¼ tsp or so each time. Once I figured out that combing was my preferred method of coaxing pulp out, I sat with 6 fruits for 2 hours extracting it all. For all that goes into this, the pulp should be worth a premium. But in our uneven and unequal world, it’s worth nothing more than the value you accord. Swipe through the post below to see the process photos.

Note that when roasted whole, panapazham pulp gets sucked & pulled between teeth, but I needed it in a dish for next steps…

Which will be detailed in my next post on banana leaf-wrapped panampazham rice cakes!

Post navigation

Pavazhamalli rasam [parijaat flower rasam]
Panampazham rice cakes

Related posts

How to Grow Meyer Lemon Trees from Seed
Halvas and Jams, How to, Local Ingredients, Sweet Things  /  September 1, 2012
by Deepa  /  70 Comments

How to Grow Meyer Lemon Trees from Seed

How to cut a Jackfruit
Histories, Local Ingredients  /  May 31, 2012
by Deepa  /  33 Comments

How to cut a Jackfruit

The Great Chutney Mystery
Chutneys, Vegan, Vegetarian  /  July 6, 2013
by Deepa  /  29 Comments

The Great Chutney Mystery

8 comments

  • Panampazham rice cakes • Pâticheri
    December 9, 2020

    […] I started at the beginning, I imagined an end, saved the in-between parts for later. You know the star ingredient from my prior post, so here’s what became of her before the details of […]

    Reply
  • Panaattu & Paani Panaattu: Sri Lankan Palmyrah fruit treats • Pâticheri
    December 20, 2020

    […] you’ve seen my earlier panampazham/palmyrah fruit processing and rice-cake-making posts, you’ll know that I’ve worked with toddy palm fruits a lot […]

    Reply
  • Koozh & the art of fermentation • Pâticheri
    January 3, 2021

    […] or cooked rice itself (morkali, pazhaya sadam or old rice), aided by additions of yogurt, coconut, panampazham, toddy and more (think: appams, panampazham cakes and such like). A world of maauving maavu […]

    Reply
  • Verkadalai-Vepampoo Urundai [Neem flower-Peanut chutney podi balls] – Pâticheri
    May 7, 2022

    […] panampazham goes another route, more insular, hiding its ice apples [“nungu” in Tamil] in a thick, […]

    Reply
  • Natural Fibre Wicks 1: Vazhainaar or Banana – Pâticheri
    May 28, 2022

    […] year, I made wicks from the fibres of the panampazham or toddy palm—not a traditional use, but my father’s health was in decline and the fruit in its multiple […]

    Reply
  • Natural Fibre Lamp Wicks 1: Vazhai naar or Banana pith – Pâticheri
    May 28, 2022

    […] year, I made wicks from the fibres of the panampazham or toddy palm—not a traditional use, but my father’s health was in decline and the fruit in its multiple […]

    Reply
  • Wild & True Nannari Sarbath – Pâticheri
    January 6, 2023

    […] never tasted so good nor looked so beautiful, the color of godhuli in a glass. A little like the panampazham which spoils so fast that it’s difficult to use commercially, what saves nannari is just that it […]

    Reply
  • A palm sugar for every season – Pâticheri
    March 12, 2025

    […] written much about the panampazham or toddy palm fruit [processing, rice cakes, payasam, malpuas, and fibre wicks] but little about the fan-shaped leaves [which were […]

    Reply

Share your thoughts Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Elara Pro by LyraThemes.com
  • Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
error: Content is protected !!
 

Loading Comments...