Chancaca

As it starts getting colder and all the variety of apples are showing up at the ferias I had an urge to make my typical fall dish of gingerbread and applesauce.   The thing besides ginger that makes gingerbread so yummy is molasses but they don't sell it here.  Luckily they do sell chancaca.

Loosely, chancaca is raw, unrefined, cane sugar with a high molasses content. Chancaca is common in South America, the Philippines and south Asia.  I read a few articles and figured I could reconstitute it as actual molasses. It took a few tries of not getting it past the hard crack stage without a candy thermometer but I got it syrupy enough to use in a gingerbread recipe.  Being unrefined, the protein, minerals and vitamins are left in.  Makes me wonder why we spend so much time refining our sugar - super yummy!

Marcela, our nana, saw what I was attempting to do (she still can't go over the fact that I cook) and offered to make us Sopaipillas Pasadas one day which is a typical Chilean winter treat of sopaipillas with chancaca sauce. We have tried the sopaipillas already, basically a fried dough that you can buy from street stands, but never with a sauce made of chancaca. Stay tuned....

Sopaipillas Pasadas