Pandan: Leaves, Extract and How to Use Them

What does pandan taste like?

A fresh leaf hardly smells until you bend it. Rub it between your fingers or heat it in liquid and it releases its aroma: sweet and grassy, with a note of popcorn and vanilla. Pandan owes its rice scent to the same aroma compound that makes jasmine and basmati rice smell the way they do. You don't eat the leaf itself, because it is tough and fibrous. You cook it along with the dish and take it out before serving.

The green color comes from the chlorophyll in the juice. In homemade extract it turns out pale and slightly olive. The bright green of some cakes usually comes from pandan paste with added coloring.

Origin and names

Pandan grows in the tropics of South and Southeast Asia as a bushy plant with swordlike leaves arranged in a spiral. The cuisines of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, Cambodia and Sri Lanka use it daily. In Thai the leaf is called bai toey (ใบเตย), in Malay and Indonesian daun pandan, in Vietnamese lá dứa and in Sri Lanka rampe. Packages in English say "pandan leaves" or "screwpine leaves".

Don't confuse pandan with kewra. Producers make this aromatic water from India from the flowers of a related Pandanus species. It smells floral and belongs in biryani and sweets.

Fresh, frozen, extract or paste

• Fresh leaves: give the best aroma. Look for deep green, firm leaves without brown tips.
• Frozen leaves: the most common form outside Southeast Asia. They taste a little weaker than fresh ones and work well for rice, syrup and coconut desserts. You use them frozen, without thawing.
• Pandan paste and pandan essence: small bottles of concentrated flavor, often with coloring. A few drops color a cake batter. They taste stronger and more artificial than leaves, but they save work.
• Dried pandan powder: rare, with a weak aroma. Fine for color, hardly useful for flavor.

Making pandan extract at home

1. Wash 10 to 12 leaves, about 50 g, and cut them into 2 cm pieces.
2. Blend them with 100 ml water in a blender for one minute until fine.
3. Put the pulp in a cheesecloth or a fine sieve and squeeze hard. You get about 80 to 100 ml of green juice.
4. For a concentrated aroma, cover the juice and refrigerate it overnight. A dark green layer settles at the bottom. Carefully pour off the clear water above it and use the sediment for cakes and creams.

The extract keeps for three to four days in the fridge. Frozen in ice cube trays, you have it ready in small portions for several months.

Uses: rice, kaya and desserts

For rice, you tie two or three leaves into a knot and add them to the cooking water. This works with jasmine rice in a pot, in a rice cooker and with coconut rice as in nasi lemak. You steam sticky rice with a leaf in the basket or cook the coconut sauce with it, as described in the guide How to Cook Sticky Rice.

In desserts, pandan usually works together with coconut milk and palm sugar:

• Custards and kaya: Sangkaya Bai Toey is a Thai pandan and coconut custard. Malaysian kaya, a spread of egg, coconut milk and sugar, also gets its fragrance from pandan leaves.
• Cakes with sticky rice: Kuih Seri Muka layers sticky rice under a green pandan custard, and Kuih Bakar comes out of the oven as a baked cake.
• Filled batters: Dadar Gulung are green crepes with a coconut filling, and Klepon are sticky rice balls with a liquid palm sugar center.
• Jellies and drinks: Num Lot from Cambodia, Es Cendol with green noodles and the cool pandan drink Nam Bai Toey.

In savory cooking, you know pandan from Thailand as a wrapper: cooks wrap marinated chicken pieces in a leaf and deep-fry them. A knotted leaf also sometimes ends up in curries and broths. The page Coconut Milk explains the difference between coconut milk, coconut cream and coconut fat.

Substitutes for pandan

No equal substitute exists. These come closest to the original:

• Pandan paste instead of leaves: 1/2 tsp paste replaces the extract from about 10 leaves. It colors more strongly and tastes more intense.
• Vanilla: hits the sweet side. In desserts, use the seeds of half a pod. The grassy note is missing.
• For rice: jasmine rice already brings part of the scent. Without pandan it tastes a little plainer, nothing more.
• Only for color: a pinch of matcha. It gives green but adds a bitter tea flavor.

Buying and storing

You can find frozen pandan leaves in the freezer case of almost every Asian grocery store, usually in bags of 100 to 200 g. Fresh leaves are less common in the fridge section and turn up more often in stores with a Thai or Vietnamese range. Pandan paste sits in the baking aisle of the Asian grocery store. All three forms are available online.

Fresh leaves keep for about a week in the vegetable drawer, packed in a freezer bag. After that they turn yellow and lose their scent. If you want to use them for longer, freeze them right after buying. Frozen, they keep for several months. Opened paste belongs in the fridge, and the label gives the time limit.