Today, coconut palm sugar, one of the world’s oldest sweeteners, is poised to become one of the world’s newest rediscoveries. For generations locals had scaled trees, harvested the blossoms, warmed the nectar over open hearths, and emptied the sweet paste into coconut molds with the same care other civilizations may have poured gold. It was one of nature’s hidden gems, at once timeless and indifferent to time. It was caramel and fruity and slightly acidic and buttery, it was like a buttery caramel.” Bali became their home, and Java would be the place they would find the secret treasure of coconut palm sugar.īen remembers the day that changed everything: “I will never forget sitting at this house watching the process from collecting the nectar in the coconut palm and bringing it down, and this woman stirring this cauldron of golden caramel syrup roasting over coffee wood, and she took this bamboo spoon and ladled it onto this plate and I voraciously lapped up everything on the plate, and it was unlike any sweetener I had ever had. It ended with Ben and Blair falling in love with the magical forests, gardens and landscapes of the Indonesian archipelago. Their global trip had started as a project to document traditional farming techniques before this collective wisdom was lost to modernity. It was a carefree restlessness, the impulse of every backpacker, that brought Ben and wife Blair here in the summer of ’97. Livingston seeking the source of the Nile, or the celebrated original founders of Banana Republic seeking a new source of madras for the summer catalog? Certainly no parallel to a Joseph Conrad novel, but was this remarkable adventurer and entrepreneur more like Dr. In the rarefied equatorial air, it was fun imagining the exotic circumstances that had drawn Big Tree Farms owner Ben Ripple to this prized oasis, years ago. There, on the upper story, we met a man who talked of cacao and sugar houses, fair trade and social transformation, as dark green hills rested in a bamboo-framed window, then rolled languidly through lengthening shadows to catch the kaleidoscope horizon. Our search for coconut palm sugar started like most ingredient stories, but a swirl of time zones and paths, crowned with an awed procession under ancient canopies of hard brown orbs and soft nectar blossoms, led us, finally, to a clearing where a chocolate palace soared into the sky. When does a story become a dream, or a dream a story? In the warm embrace of the tropics, in a land of smiles, it is hard to know.
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