Desi Khand

Details

Desi khand is cane juice boiled and crystallised, with the crystals separated from the molasses and nothing done to whiten them. It sits between the two things already in your kitchen. White sugar in India is almost all made by sulphitation: sulphur dioxide is bubbled through the juice to strip the colour, the molasses is taken out completely, and what is left is close to pure sucrose with a sulphur residue and none of the cane left in it. Jaggery is the opposite, the whole boiled-down juice set solid with all its molasses still in it, which is why it is dark, strongly flavoured and awkward to measure. Khand is crystallised like sugar and it spoons and dissolves like sugar, so it goes into tea and into baking where jaggery will not, and it keeps a trace of the molasses, which is where the colour and the faint caramel come from. Two cheats run in this category. The first is sulphur used anyway and the pack still labelled sulphur free. The second is the jaggery trick in reverse: ordinary refined white sugar tinted with caramel colour and sold as desi khand at three times the price. Sulphur dioxide residue settles the first. The second is settled by numbers a dye cannot fake, because real khand is a lower-purity sugar and carries reducing sugars and ash that refined sugar simply does not have.

• No sulphur at any stage, sulphur dioxide not detected
• No sodium hydrosulphite and no bleaching agent
• No caramel or synthetic colour, screened per lot
• Not refined white sugar tinted to look unrefined, confirmed by reducing sugars and ash
• No anti-caking agent
• It is beige to light brown, the shade moves between lots, and the crystals are uneven and slightly sticky, so it can cake in a damp kitchen
• It is a shade less sweet by the spoon than refined sugar, so a cup of tea may want a little more
• It is sugar. There is no health claim here, only the absence of the sulphur