Eleven years ago, La Rifa Chocolatería in Mexico City introduced a dizzyingly dark, dense chocolate and cream tamal to its menu. Run through with the sultry flavors of caramel, butterscotch and molasses, the dish would quickly become one of its most popular to date.
Of its carefully collected local ingredients (blue corn masa from Cal y Maíz, nata from Lácteos la Ordeña and Mexican-grown cacao toasted and ground in-house), the tamal’s most remarkable element may be piloncillo, an unrefined whole-cane sugar.
Recipe: Piloncillo Chocolate Chip Cookie
“The caramel flavors in the piloncillo balance the acidity of our chocolates,” said Mónica Lozano, a founding partner of La Rifa, which gets its piloncillo from sustainable sugar-cane farms in the eastern part of Mexico.
You can still taste the grassy honeysuckle and anise flavors of the sugar cane in the piloncillo because it’s made by hand and without industrial processing, she said, adding that they prefer it to regular sugar.
Known as chancaca in Chile, Bolivia and Peru, and panela in Guatemala and Colombia, piloncillo (in Mexico) is made by crushing and extracting the juice from sugar cane. (A similar product, jaggery, is also found in South Asia, Central America, Brazil and Africa.) The crushed cane and fibers are dried and fuel the fire used to boil the juice, evaporate the water and caramelize the sugars. The hot syrup, similar to molasses, is poured into wooden cone-shaped molds, cooled until hard, then sold in stores and markets.
It’s used in desserts like puerquitos, soft, pig-shaped cookies that are popular in Mexico and not unlike gingerbread. Capirotada, a fruit-filled bread pudding eaten during Lent and Easter, and café de olla, a spiced coffee, are both sweetened with piloncillo. It also adds depth and complexity to savory dishes, like moles and guisos (stews), giving them smoky, coffee and rummy flavors.
The easiest way to use piloncillo is to make a simple syrup and flavor it with citrus zest, warming spices or even chiles to then pour over buñelos, pancakes or roasted sweet potatoes. You can also mix it into coffee or hot chocolate, and use it in recipes that call for molasses, like barbecue sauces, cakes and pies.
But to experience piloncillo’s recipe-changing power in your own cooking, you’re going to have to box-grate it into soft, pillowy piles. Yes, it’s a little bit of a workout, but it’s completely worth it. (Some larger pieces of that caramelized sugar will fall through the grater holes, and that’s OK. They’ll wind up as golden toffee-like nuggets in your baked goods.)
In cookies — like in this piloncillo chocolate chip cookie — you get all the flavor of browned butter without the work, since the intense sugar cane mimics its flavor. And, if you are a dark chocolate lover, you can also use a much more intensely flavored chocolate because the piloncillo will mellow and balance its assertiveness.
Piloncillo has a very long shelf life and can be stored in a resealable plastic bag in your pantry for months. Because you’ll be shaving rock-hard sugar into a fine dust, the large holes of your grater are going to dull after several uses and will make grating harder cheeses, like Parmesan more of a chore. You may want to consider buying a cheap box grater and designating it just for piloncillo. Save the fancy one for your cheese.
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