A few months back I made a beautiful trip into the Sierra Nevada mountains to meet with an indigenous brother there who had recently had his first child and was living in a new community with his wife and family.
This Arhuaco family specialise in making panela (sugar) from raw sugar cane.
I had the pleasure of helping them through the full process.
To give context, the whole family helped out — that included the 3 year old son, the 5 year old daughter and the 8 year old son. The kids would come throughout the day of their own volition to help out, and consume as much of the sugar as they could get at every step of the process. The 8 year old, Henry, stayed working with us for the majority of the time, occasionally going off to play with his little brother and sister.
We started at dawn. Cutting and collecting the sugar cane, stopping occasionally to suck the sweet nectar from the cane like candy.
When we had collected enough to fill the oil drum with jugo de caña, we started pressing it.
This process works with the help of a mule through a simple but satisfying cycle of animal power, mechanical crushing, and flowing juice.
The mule walks a slow, continuous circle around a central post, turning a long wooden arm connected to a series of heavy rollers — two vertical cylinders of iron set tightly together.
As the animal plods its worn path, the rollers turn in opposition to each other.
We would take it in turns to feed the cut cane horizontally into the gap between the rollers. The press bites down and drags the cane through, squeezing it with tremendous pressure. The juice — pale green, slightly cloudy, and intensely sweet — weeps out and runs down into the oil drum.
What comes out the other side is the spent cane, called bagasse — dry, pale, fibrous, and flat, crushed into thin mats. One of us would collect it up and set it aside to dry as fuel for the fire later in the process.
There would always be one of us walking behind the mule, keeping him moving with a gentle waft of the whip at his rear.
We stopped halfway through to drink the sugar cane juice with a good squeeze of fresh lime juice. This was unreal — absolutely delicious and a great reward for the hard graft so far.
Once all the caña had been passed through and the barrel was full, we poured the liquid via a hose into a giant pot sitting over a huge fireplace.
We then spent the next 8 hours cooking it down, reducing and reducing until it was less than half the volume.
This was incredibly hard work. Keeping a fire this size going constantly for that long requires a lot of wood, and real delicacy — not so hot that it burns the sugar, and not so low that it won’t reduce. It was clear the father was a master of the fire.
At the golden moment when the consistency is more sticky than liquid, the contents were transferred into what looked like a canoe. Instead of oars we had a wooden arm that was continuously worked up and down through the sugar, and with each pass it would become thicker, the colour shifting more and more towards golden.
This too was a very physical process — as the consistency became thicker and thicker, the energy required to keep it moving went up and up.
After almost 24 hours of the full process, we had 24 x 1lb blocks of panela!
Proof of Work to the maximum!
The reason I tell you all this is because I would love to bring this 100% natural and organic sweetness to the Bitcoin community as an example of real food made by real people! The opposite of the white sugar that contaminates our shops and restaurants.
I am hoping to receive 10lbs of panela in powder within the next two weeks and then ship it to the US for some lucky Bitcoiners to enjoy with their
@Bitcoin Beans Cacao, or
@Satoshi Coffee Co. coffee, or
@The Bitcoin Coffee Guy⚡️☕️ Koffee, or in any of
@AliceA @Oshi (推し) incredible recipes.
Hit us up on the DM to pre order.
Sweet sweet sweet PoW!
