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Sweet, but is it the best?

Jaggery is an ingredient in Ayurvedic medicine

JAGGERY It is integral to several Indian cuisines

Jaggery is a form of unrefined sugar, which is made from sugarcane or date palm. The hard sweet cake is made by simmering sugarcane juice or date sap in large vats.

Its use in India goes back thousands of years and features in several Hindu rituals. The hard wheat-brown cake is integral to several Indian cuisines. Gujarat's curries, for example, get their sweetish edge from jaggery added during cooking. During the British Raj, when refined sugar was not yet available, tea was taken with a small lump of jaggery. Such tea has a thicker feel, and the taste lingers. While some, especially the older generations, prefer to have their tea with jaggery rather than sugar, there are many who will put the tea down the moment they know it has jaggery in it.

Unlike refined sugar that dissolves easily, jaggery can be made to hold a desired shape and consistency, which makes it an ideal medium for many Indian sweets. The taste is milder than refined sugar. Some of the most popular toffees and sweets in India, made from peanuts or cashew nut, use jaggery as sweet glue.

Deceiving looks

Perhaps because of its mild sweetness, jaggery has a completely undeserved reputation for being low in calories. For instance, 100 gm of cane jaggery has 383 Calorie, which is 60 Calorie more than 100 gm of honey. Perhaps because of its dark colour, jaggery has the reputation for being rich in iron. It is not true.

The cake has only small, nutritionally insignificant, amounts of iron, calcium and phosphorus. You'd get the same iron and minerals for a lot less calories in other foods. Jaggery also has a reputation for being chemical free. Certainly the cake has an earthy and an uncontaminated-by-chemicals look to it, but looks are deceiving in this case. Jaggery is a popular ingredient in Ayurvedic medicine. Often the cake is just a sweet vehicle for bitter herbs and roots, but many Ayurveda practitioners attribute intrinsic medicinal properties to jaggery.

RAJIV. M

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