page_title: Jaggery
section_title: Preparation
hierarchical_section_title: Jaggery / Origins and production / Preparation
caption_attribution_description: English: Harvesting SugarCane without Pre-Burn - notice the trashin abundance on the ground, which is then irrigated with Lease Water, that creates nutrients for the next generation crop
context_page_description: Jaggery is a traditional non-centrifugal cane sugar consumed in Asia. It is a concentrated product of cane juice and often date or palm sap without separation of the molasses and crystals, and can vary from golden brown to dark brown in colour, and is similar to the Latin American panela. It contains up to 50% sucrose, up to 20% invert sugars, and up to 20% moisture, with the remainder made up of other insoluble matter, such as wood ash, proteins, and bagasse fibres.
context_section_description: Historically, the sugarcane cultivators used crushers that were powered by oxen, but all modern crushers are power-driven. These crushers are placed in fields near the sugarcane plants. The cut and cleaned sugarcane is crushed and the extracted cane juice is collected in a large vessel. A certain quantity of the juice is transferred to a smaller vessel for heating on a furnace.
  The vessel is heated for about an hour. Dried wood pulp from the crushed sugarcane is traditionally used as fuel for the furnace. While boiling the juice, lime is added to it so that all the wood particles rise to the top of the juice in a froth, which is skimmed off. Finally, the juice is thickened. The resulting thick liquid is about one-third of the original volume.
  This hot liquid is golden. It is stirred continuously and lifted with a spatula to observe whether it forms a thread or drips while falling. If it forms many threads, it has completely thickened. It is poured into a shallow flat-bottomed pan to cool and solidify. The pan is extremely large to allow only a thin coat of this hot liquid to form at its bottom, so as to increase the surface area for quick evaporation and cooling. After cooling, the jaggery becomes a soft solid that is molded into the desired shape.
  The quality of jaggery is judged by its colour; brown means it is higher in impurities and golden-yellow implies it is relatively pure. Due to this grading scale, coloured adulterants are sometimes added to jaggery to simulate the golden hue.
caption: Harvesting sugar cane without pre-burn – the abundant waste on the ground will be irrigated to release nutrients for the next crop
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