Painful fact: you've got to loose a few extra pounds and don't really know why every attempts fails, or you find out that your attempts have resulted in a weight gain. Ouch!

For people loving food and anything that revolves around it (like me...), weight control happens to be a real obstacle course, a daily struggle, an agony, almost. For the past few months, I have been trying to control my food intake following the glycemic index of ingredients and meals. Being an eternal skeptic, I thought it would never work, nor at least not in the long run, but it did. And my electronic body-scale thanks me every time for the efforts!

My New Discovery

I have found myself eating gargantuan meals like never before and discovered a completely new way to enjoy food. No kidding, but that's a whole different story. Except that as a Pastry Chef, there is one thing that I can't go without and it's sugar. And even my beloved honey is high on the glycemic index; and after having tried pure fructose and other alternatives too many times, I thought I have enough. Until a reader of this column sent me samples of pure palm sugar from Indonesia.

I was keen to give it a try with a glycemic index standing below 30 and with myself not being used to that type of sugar, I thought ‘why not?' Although I have been in Asia for 12 years now, I shamefully never bothered to try much other sugar than brown, red, or...perhaps I glanced over palm sugar once or twice and associated it with fully hydrogenated palm oil (which bothers me not for health reasons, but for the whole biofuel controversy...). However, I learned that the trees used for palm sugar where not cut and forest was not destroyed, but harvested and maintained, generating a sustainable culture and providing jobs to a whole community.

Palm sugar comes in different shades of brown, with the texture and moisture similar to Demerara sugar. I found the taste of it rounder than brown sugar, with pleasant notes of caramel. I also enjoyed the long lasting flavours it features, compared to its cousin, where the flavour vanishes too promptly for my taste.

Putting it to the Test

So I gave it a try with some fabulous poached William pears, golden raisins, fresh orange zest and packed all the palm sugar I could into a crumble, with a little extra touch of rolled oats and a good pinch of salt.

In the preparation and the baking, I noticed that palm sugar didn't dissolve in the dough as easily as other sugar, so the browning of the dough was not as much as it would normally be and the texture of the raw crumble was even more sandy than usual.

Nevermind; the crumble came out of the oven piping hot and the smell of that crumble was heavenly. I shot a few pictures as quick as I could so that I could give it a try, and it was really good. And, I mean really good as in awesomely good! I am not talking about some new hydrocolloid discoveries here, but just simple good food. You've got to try this, and yes, here is the recipe.

Ingredients

Pears

4 fresh pears (medium sized William pear if possible)

20gm palm sugar

1 tbsp butter

Cinnamon, nutmeg

Zest of ½ orange

50ml apple juice

1 tsp corn starch

A handful of golden raisins

Crumble

100gm plain white flour

50gm palm sugar (I used Masarang Arenga Palm Sugar)

60gm cold butter

2 tbsp rolled oats

A good pinch of salt

Method

Preparing the fruit

Wash and peal the pears. Cut them into large chunks.

In a cooking pot, melt the palm sugar and add the butter. Add the pears, the cinnamon and nutmeg.

Leave it to cook for about 3 minutes. Dissolve the cornstarch in the apple juice and pour it in. Cook until the cornstarch thickens. Fill your dishes with the cooked pear to ¾ of the height.

Preparing the crumble and finishing the dessert

In a bowl, mix all the ingredients into crumbles.

Add a layer of about 1 cm on top of the fruits.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200°C for about 20 minutes. Serve warm with vanilla custard or ice cream.

More Info

www.sugarpalmtree.com