Jaggery

I'm kinda obsessed with apples right now, which is good. Every other week my mom's caregiver brings the mama to my house, and with her a hoard of apples. They're available for the taking at the dining room at my mom's community. She takes and never eats, and then they come to me.

I started making applesauce with them recently, and decided that I'd use jaggery instead of white sugar. It turned out delicious, and now I'm strung out on that particular recipe. What is jaggery? It's a sugar that is less purified. The jaggery we had in the house was from an Indian IPA recipe mrguy was brewing for a time, and I've been using it over the years for sweetness and funk when cooking. Using it is a labor of love, because it is packaged in hard lumps that have to be grated or even microplaned before you can  measure it. 

The other day I used the last of our 1lb bag. Mrguy ordered some from Whole Foods and it arrived...granulated. It will have a place in our pantry but it smelled more like a granular molasses than the musky, funky and almost savory flavor I've come to love. So today I will go in person to the South Asian grocery and see what they have. Crossing my fingers that they'll have OG jaggery and not this newfangled powdered stuff.

In the meantime, Atlas Obscura has served me this article about a Russian sweet called pastila, which is a labor-intensive apple meringue. I want to make it so badly but today's oath is "No cooking, only eating".