Rapadura

the whole-cane sugar brick of the Brazilian north-east: fresh juice skimmed and boiled to a thick paste, beaten until it grains, and poured into wooden moulds to set hard enough to scrape

Origin: Brazil

From the journey of Sugar Cane.

Rapadura takes its name from the Portuguese raspar, to scrape, for the way the hard set block is scraped with a knife to yield the sugar, and it is the oldest and plainest product of the Brazilian cane country. The great engenhos of Pernambuco and Bahia existed to make refined sugar for Lisbon and Antwerp, but alongside them, and long after them, the small engenhoca made rapadura for the people who lived there: the whole boiled-down juice with every trace of its molasses left in, poured into wooden moulds and set into bricks that keep for months without refrigeration in a climate that destroys almost everything else. In the arid sertão of the north-east it became a staple rather than a treat, carried by drovers and farm workers with a piece of dried meat and a handful of cassava flour, and it lends the language a proverb, rapadura é doce mas não é mole, rapadura is sweet but it is not soft, said of a person or a task that looks easier than it is. It is eaten in scraped shavings or bitten straight from the block, dissolved in water or coffee, melted into cakes and puddings, and worked with peanuts into the brittle pé de moleque. Its flavour is nothing like refined sugar: smoky, mineral, faintly sour, and unmistakably of the field.

Ingredients

  • 4 litre fresh sugar cane juice, pressed the same day (from about 8 kg of cane)
  • 1 whole lime, juiced (optional, to help clarify)
  • 2 tbsp neutral oil, for the moulds

Method

  1. Strain the juice twice through muslin into a wide, heavy, shallow pan and leave it to stand for 20 minutes so the fine sediment settles; pour off the clear juice and discard the sludge at the bottom.
  2. Bring to the boil over a high heat, adding the lime juice if using. A thick grey foam will rise almost immediately; skim it off with a slotted spoon and keep skimming, patiently, for the first 20 to 30 minutes until the surface stays reasonably clear.
  3. Reduce to a steady rolling boil and cook, stirring occasionally and scraping the base, for about an hour, until the volume has fallen by roughly four-fifths and the syrup is thick, dark amber, and glossy, dropping from the spoon in a heavy sheet.
  4. Watch closely and test often: drop a little syrup into cold water. When it sets immediately into a firm ball that can be rolled between the fingers and holds its shape, at about 120°C, take the pan off the heat at once.
  5. Beat the syrup hard with a wooden spoon or paddle for 2 to 3 minutes off the heat, until it thickens, lightens a shade, loses its gloss, and begins to grain. Pour at once into oiled wooden or metal moulds and leave to set for 1 to 2 hours until hard.

Notes

Fresh cane juice is sold at Brazilian, Latin American, and Southeast Asian grocers and juice stalls and is increasingly available frozen; it must be fresh, not bottled and pasteurised, which has usually been sweetened and will not behave. The recipe scales down without difficulty and a two-litre batch is far easier to manage. Rapadura keeps for months wrapped in paper in a dry place and gradually hardens; store it away from humidity, which makes it weep. Use it in shavings over fruit or porridge, dissolved in hot water or coffee, melted with peanuts into pé de moleque, or in place of brown sugar in any baking, where it gives a darker crumb and a smoky depth. It is the same product, under other names and with small local differences of moulding, as Colombian panela, Mexican piloncillo, Andean chancaca, and Indian gur.

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