Palm sugar craft village

26/11/2021

If traveling to An Giang, everyone must have bought jaggery as a gift. But did you know, Palm sugar production village is also an interesting place to visit. Focusing on planting many jaggery trees and having traditional jaggery cooking villages are 02 districts of Tri Ton and Tinh Bien. To learn more about jaggery cooking, you can visit the jaggery craft village in Chau Lang commune, Tri Ton district or Lan Nhi jaggery factory in An Phu commune, Tinh Bien district.

When the rainy season ends and the weather turns dry, it is also the time when Khmer people here are busy preparing tools and ready for the new jaggery cooking season… Households working as sugar cooks are often in different places. deep in the squirrel, in the thum, these are the houses nestled in the middle of a jaggery garden. Normally, each such family will own about 10 palm trees or more. Palm sugar is cooked with the water secreted from the cuts in the jaggery tree, not from the juice in the jaggery fruit. The farmer will use a bamboo ladder to climb to the top of the tree. When reaching the top of the tree, people cut off the tops of the flower stalks, then use a plastic can to collect water. In the past, thorny bamboo tubes, large pipes, and internodes were used to collect jaggery juice, but nowadays, bamboo tubes are no longer used, but instead are small plastic containers for light work. If the tree gives good water, the batch of sugar will be delicious, easy to beat, beautiful color, can be used to pour canopies (clumps of sugar). If there is little water or the water is not clear, it is only used to cook the melted sugar. Once the water is collected, you must start cooking sugar immediately, if it is left for too long, it will have a sour smell that will reduce the quality of the sugar. After the jaggery is filtered out of impurities, it is cooked until it thickens, cooled, and then poured into the mold to complete. The cooling process of sugar in nature is also the time when they recrystallize into fine crystals. On average, about 8-10 liters of jaggery juice will yield 1kg of sugar. In traditional sugar furnaces, in addition to jaggery juice, almost no additives are used.


The sweet and fragrant jaggery is wrapped in jaggery leaves that look like beautiful tet cakes. The profession of cooking jaggery is a traditional occupation of the Khmer people in An Giang, which is recognized as a traditional handicraft village. Palm sugar is a local specialty, for the Khmer people it is a precious gift of heaven and earth. Many families follow the profession of sugar cooking from generation to generation. The life and income of road workers depend greatly on nature. The profession of making palm sugar does not happen all year round, when An Giang enters the rainy season, the slippery palm tree trunks are difficult to climb to get, the molasses is not much, it is also the end of the sugar making season. But with enthusiasm and wanting to maintain this long-standing traditional profession, not wanting it to be lost, they still cling from life to life. Learning about palm sugar making is learning about a part of the national culture. Come to An Giang, try once to visit and buy sugar to support ethnic minorities to contribute to the development of traditional industries.

 

Bich Phuong - An Giang Trade And Investment Promotion Center

 
 

 

 

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