Tapa Dulce

Warning: long post ahead! Kept realizing how long it was getting, but still wanting to share more! Sorry. :)

Since I arrived in October, I´ve been patiently waiting to be part of a big event on the farm: making tapa dulce. It´s something that the Chinchillas do every few months - as often as the sugar cane field returns to a dense, sweet, jungle of stalks.  Last Wednesday, I got the word.  Early in the morning, I pulled on long pants and long sleeves and headed out into the cañal. While neighborhood men carefully selected the sweetest (oldest) stalks, shaved them of leaves, and sliced them from their roots, I hauled armful after armful toward the trapiche. 

 Mom and Mike pose in the sugar cane field during their visit.

Basically a large rotating press which feeds the extracted juice into a pair of enormous pots, the trapiche mostly sits waiting, hidden in a corner of the farm away from everyday view.  But this day it became a hot, noisy factory.  Once we had a big enough pile to satisfy my host-dad Memo, we fired up the machine and got to work.  He fed cane after cane into the clanking machine and I grabbed the husks as they slithered out like fresh pasta.  The bundles of husks will be burnt as fuel the next time we make dulce, but find a second life in the mean time as bedding for the pigs (and later fertilizer!)

The press with its impressive gears, with piles of bagazo behind.

Dark, swampy green cane juice quickly filled the gigantic pots below us as we worked, and soon it was time to start cooking.  After all the dirty work of harvesting and crushing sugar cane comes the fun and delicious work of cooking it.  Each stage of the five hour process has a name and a treat to taste, and all of us dutifully ate ourselves sick.

A few of many of the delicious stages of sugar:

Dirty and cut up by the sugar cane - ready to start eating.  

This is the simplest treat - sugar cane with the husk cut away.  Sweet, gushing, and refreshing.

Atolillo.

The first byproduct of cooking - a superfine foam that is just barely sweet but very velvety.

 

 Espumas.

As the mixture comes to a boil, a huge spoon with lots of holes in it is used to mix and fluff the juice. The millions of bubbles are also scooped off and eaten with a spoon - it has a texture like the head of a beer.

 

Rondas.

This pic is of the very rim of the cooking pot.  As the pot is stirred, foam laps onto the edges and begins to cook there.  As the foam is scraped off, it turns just a tiny bit sticky.  This was my favorite stage.

Pruebas.

Look how far the juice has cooked down at this point!  Wooden paddles are scooped into the pot and then swished in buckets of water.  The stained-glass sugar that comes off is tested for how fast it breaks - this indicates if the sugar is ready for the trough.  But it also tastes absolutely delicious.  Toasty, chewy, and warm. Important to be careful about fillings with this stuff.

After a mysterious point of perfection is reached in the large cooking pot, the sugar is poured into this large trough and stirred constantly for around 10 minutes.  Here, the consistency moves from glassy and smooth to more granular.

A small portion of the sugar mixture is scooped out to make sobado, a delicious candy that will be shared with friends and neighbors.

And then, finally, it´s time.  The sugar gets poured into mold after mold, sets for a surprisingly few minutes, and then gets flipped with a THUNK onto the table to turn out the molds.  What you´re left with, after an entire day of crushing, cooking and stirring (and just the beginning of the stomachache that is to come), is:

Tapa Dulce.