Jaggery

Details

Cane jaggery boiled in open pans, from cane grown in the belts of western Maharashtra and northern Karnataka, one crushing season, cut into cubes and nothing else done to it. The cheat here works because shoppers have been taught the wrong signal. Light golden jaggery reads as pure and dark jaggery reads as dirty, and the truth is the other way round. Cane juice boiled down without chemicals goes dark brown to nearly black. To hold a block light, units use sodium hydrosulphite, hydros in the trade, which is a bleaching agent, and sulphur fumes or sulphite as a clarifier, and both leave a sulphur dioxide residue in the block you eat. Chalk, lime and washing soda get added to bulk the weight and set the block harder. Where none of that is enough there is straight synthetic colour. All of it is measurable. Sulphur dioxide residue catches the bleaching and the sulphitation. Total ash with a calcium figure catches chalk, lime and washing soda, which dissolve in acid and so will not show up in an acid-insoluble ash test on their own. Acid-insoluble ash catches the sand and grit that come with a careless pan. A colour screen catches added dye.

• No sodium hydrosulphite and no bleaching agent of any kind
• No sulphur fumes and no sulphite clarifier, sulphur dioxide not detected
• No chalk, lime or washing soda, checked by total ash and calcium
• No added colour, synthetic or caramel
• No added sugar and no invert syrup poured back in
• It is dark brown to nearly black and the shade moves between lots, because the colour is only the cane and the pan
• It softens and can weep a little in the monsoon, and a pale bloom on the surface is sugar coming out, not mould
• It is sugar. It carries a little iron and some minerals that white sugar does not, and it is still sugar