pandan

Pandan is Malay and Indonesian, from the Pandanus plant (Pandanus amaryllifolius). The scientific name Pandanus comes from the Malay pandan. The plant is a tropical screwpine with long, blade-like leaves that are intensely aromatic when bruised or cooked. The flavor is difficult to describe to those who have not encountered it: nutty, grassy, floral, with a compound (2-acetyl-1-pyrroline) that is also responsible for the aroma of basmati rice, jasmine rice, and popcorn.

Pandan is used across Southeast Asia with the same ubiquity that vanilla is used in Western baking. In Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, pandan leaves are added to rice during cooking (for fragrance), knotted and dropped into curries, blended into batters for cakes and drinks, and used as wrappers for grilled chicken (gai hor bai toey). Pandan extract — bright green — colors Southeast Asian desserts their distinctive emerald.

The leaf was historically difficult to export. Fresh pandan wilts quickly, and dried pandan loses most of its aroma. Pandan extract and pandan paste became the standard exports, but they are poor substitutes for the fresh leaf. The 2010s and 2020s saw a surge of interest in pandan in Western baking — pandan cake, pandan chiffon, pandan latte — driven by Asian diaspora food culture and social media.

Pandan chiffon cake is Singapore's and Malaysia's most beloved cake — a light, green sponge flavored with pandan juice and coconut milk. It is the birthday cake, the office cake, the 'I brought something' cake. The bright green color, which comes from the leaf extract rather than artificial coloring, is the visual signature. A green cake that tastes like a tropical garden.