Nam Tan Tanot (Sugar Palm Sugar)

Nam tan tanot is the sugar boiled from the sap of the sugar palm, Borassus flabellifer, known in Thai as tanot or tan, a tall palm that stands in rows along the rice fields of the central plains. Phetchaburi is the province most closely associated with it, where climbers ascend the trunks to cut the flower stalks and collect the sap in the morning. David Thompson in Thai Food treats it as the sweetener of the central Thai kitchen, preferred to the sugar of the coconut palm for its depth and its clean, rounded sweetness.

The sap is simmered in wide pans until it thickens and is then poured into moulds or tins, giving a firm, pale golden to amber sugar that is sold in cakes, discs or soft pots. Thompson distinguishes it from the sugar of the coconut palm, Cocos nucifera, which is softer and more smoky in character; the sugar of Borassus flabellifer is paler, finer in grain and less assertive. It is shaved or pounded and dissolved into curry pastes, dressings, sauces and sweetmeats, where it softens the salt and sourness of the dish and supplies body as well as sweetness.

Nam tan tanot is eaten within the balance of salty, sour, hot and sweet that governs the central Thai table, dissolved into curries, nam phrik, dressings and the sauces served with fried and grilled foods. It is also the sweetener of coconut desserts, where its restrained flavour sits beside the richness of coconut cream without overwhelming it. The structural reason is that sweetness in Thai cooking is a counterweight, not a flavour in its own right: it softens the sharpness of lime and tamarind and the salt of fish sauce, and the sugar of the sugar palm does this with more roundness than refined sugar.