How to process a panampazham or toddy palm fruit

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!