I started to get interested in Ayurveda when I was in my mid-teens. If this seems like a weird age to be interested in a thousands of years old healing and lifestyle tradition from Asia, you're probably right. I wouldn't know anything about being normal having grown up outside the realm of normalcy. We were actually encouraged to be eccentric, and boy did that work out well. Okay, anyway, I grew up in a health conscious family and I worked in a natural foods co-op, and then a privately owned natural foods store for many years. I learned a lot.
There are some very good overviews of Ayurveda online, so I'm not going to give some big lecture about it. I will simply say that after reading about it, it clicked - that this was, perhaps, one of the healthiest ways to eat and live, and it made complete sense (to me at least) to base a lot of that around each individual's needs, physically and mentally.
One thing that first surprised me was the use of sugar. No, not white sugar, but jaggery or gur, which are unrefined sugars. They weren't just used to flavor food, they were used in herbal remedies and they weren't considered an ingredient whose only use was to make the remedy palatable. Most of these formulas are for the lungs and throat, like sitopaladi, a powdered combination of heating herbs, such as pepper, to be taken with honey or ghee. I also noticed that for certain body types, unrefined sugar was suggested as part of the diet. It was considered to be good for you. These sugars still contain some precious minerals and are not devoid of nutritional value. That doesn't mean it's alright to start consuming giant hunks of it like the one above, simply that it needn't be feared and avoided like processed white sugar.
I've looked for jaggery for a long time and have never been able to find it until recently. And I love it. It was at our local Indian store and it is typically sold like in the photo above, in several smaller squares, or in powder. I prefer it chunky, so that I can shave off what I need. Also, the powder tends to have tiny rocks in it and the sugar cane fibers are more noticeable, making you feel like you're eating some hairy sugar. Not too good. I put it in my herbal tea, hot cereal, and anything else that needs sweetening. I haven't used it for baking cakes or anything like that as its form doesn't lend itself as readily to that. Its taste is much richer and more flavorful than even brown sugar.
So this is my new favorite. My old favorite was agave, but it's more expensive than jaggery. What sweetener do you like and use?
