I have a very special guest post today from my friend Prachi Deshpande. You may remember Prachi from her previous guest post last year, an ode to the Hawkins Futura Pressure Cooker Cookbook. Though they’re based in Kolkata, for the last few years Prachi and her partner have been involved with a small family farm that they started in Birbhum district in West Bengal. I’ve been following their progress on Prachi’s Instagram feed for the farm. One of the things I like very much about that feed is how un-prettified and un-aestheticized it is; and I appreciate very much as well how open she is about the difficulties and challenges of this project.

Which is not to say that there is nothing about her reports of work on the farm that engages in a sensual manner. I have been salivating for two years now over the pictures of the dana gur/granular jaggery they produce every spring from the sugarcane they grow. They sell it in Kolkata and it is a source of annual agony for me that I cannot get any of it. I am glad, however, that I finally managed to convince her to document the process of production of this gur as a post for my blog. What follows is a brief introduction by Prachi to what they are up to at their farm and then a slideshow of images taken on a phone camera of the gur being made. The pictures in the slideshow have captions that explain each step in detail. [Note: the two videos posted to the right of Prachi’s write-up would in the production sequence follow the slideshow photograph captioned “The Night Vigil”.]

Take a read, take a look and if you are in Kolkata or know anyone who will be traveling there soon see if you can get your hands on some of the gur (details are in the last image of the slideshow). And in case it needs to be said, while I am very happy to promote my friend’s endeavour, there is no quid pro quo involved.

Gur Making at Grass Hamlet ~ Prachi Deshpande

Grass Hamlet is a small four-year-old farm in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, India. We are a couple of academics with two young children trying to grow some of our food and learning about sustainable agriculture and agroforestry. Our goal is to make it a thriving food forest, developed through principles of natural farming, which can eventually supply most of our family’s nutritional and food needs, and also be an ecosystem for local flora and fauna. Our initial interest developed while living in the US, inspired by critiques of the broken food system. We also wished strongly to somehow reconnect with our roots, however tangled up in multiple languages, regions, and experiences. Although based in Bengal, the name Grass Hamlet is a translation of Hullikeri, the name of my ancestral village across the country in northern Karnataka.

Translating these aims on to the ground amid myriad hurdles, and work and family commitments in the city, has been an exhilarating, instructive experience so far! It is teaching us as much about ourselves, our strengths, and limits, as about the joys and challenges of growing food. Connecting with people in the village has been a mixed bag – our neighbours have been more welcoming than I had anticipated, despite predictable raised eyebrows about how serious we city folk are about all this, especially someone like me who is not even from this region. Yet it takes a long time to peel away the layers of rural practice and learn about the intricacies of local government and village life, and we’re still figuring it out. Seeing ourselves not as educated people armed with superior knowledge about sustainability, but as newbies who wish to learn from farmers with practical experience in actually seeing a crop from seed to table, even if through conventional agriculture, has helped us establish channels of communication with our neighbours who often work for us as farmhands to supplement their income. We have been lucky to connect with one farmer Kartik, who is very eager to learn about organic/natural practices and experiment with them on our farm, but also freely shares his own knowledge with us. We also did a week-long introductory course on natural farming and permaculture principles at the nearby Smell of the Earth farm, which was very useful in getting us started, and remains an inspiration.

Grass Hamlet is still in its initial stages of setup. In the last three years we have planted several fruit trees such as mango, jackfruit, sapota, bel, guava, litchi, java plum, wood apple, rose apple, papaya, banana, and mulberry, some of which have just begun giving us fruit. We also have various perennials, thorny and medicinal shrubs, and small trees for a live fence. Knitting and spinning fibre were my serious hobbies when I lived in the US, but there is sadly little need for warm clothes in this climate. So I have learnt to spin cotton instead of wool, and one of my joys has been to revive and propagate a perennial tree cotton called phele which has long been grown in eastern and north-eastern India. A few trees give me enough to card and spin over the year. In the last few years, we have also successfully grown various annual staples for family consumption: rice, potatoes, mustard, chickpeas, and peanuts, and lots of vegetables. Experimenting with a range of annuals has given us some sense of what to focus on commercially in the future – oilseeds, legumes, perhaps some livestock – but also brought home the importance of focusing on developing perennials, and establishing a longer-term design for the farm as a whole. The pandemic has both frustrated some of these efforts and brought home the importance of investing in it; let’s see what the next couple of years bring us.

The one crop we have grown successfully for sale in the last three years is sugarcane, which is sowed in April and harvested the following year around the same time. We process this cane on-site first into juice, and then into thick, viscous and grainy molasses or jaggery, known as gur, to sell locally in the Kolkata urban market. The entire process is heavily skill and labour-intensive. Depending on the amount of sugarcane and labour we can hire to cut it, it takes about 24-26 hours from starting to cut and clean the cane, to pouring the completed jaggery into tins the following morning. But the end product is delicious, with a dark look and smoky taste that far surpasses the commercially grown and processed blocks of cane jaggery in the markets. This April I documented the entire process through a series of photos, mostly candid ones on my mobile phone camera.

Planted last April, the cane is now ripe and ready for cutting.

The ripened cane is cut and cleaned. The dried leaves along its length are sheared off with scythes. The cutting and cleaning is a laborious task, as the dried leaves are razor sharp, and small bits can get into your eyes and nose in a breeze. This process takes all day. Once cleaned, the stalks are tied into small bundles, and lined up near the juicer.

It is sundown by the time the cane is cut and cleaned. It’s time to set up the juicing machine, which we rent for the duration of the processing from Supriyo-da, the local jaggery-making ostad, or specialist. It is secured and wedged into the ground, and attached to a large electric motor. See the cleaned cane bundles in the back? They will pass through the two rotating cylinders in the middle.

As night falls, the juicing begins. To the thud-thud-thud sound of the motor and the turning cylinders, Lokkhon-da, one of the regular farm workers, continuously feeds the cane stalks manually into the machine. The assembly line involves keeping stalks ready for him to pickup.

At the other end, the juiced stalks – the bagasse – emerges thick and fast as the cylinders keep rolling. Karthik keeps it from piling up, moving it away, and Pilu keeps filling it into a wheelbarrow to pile up a distance away. The bagasse will later on be used as mulch around our fruit trees and other perennials.

The sugarcane juice is collected in small pans, and then poured through a mesh and bamboo basket into the deg, or large flat pan.

This mesh separates the liquid juice from all the solid matter that has collected in the initial juicing process.

The filtered juice is delicious to drink as-is with a dash of black salt and lemon, and a favourite summer drink. We all have a small glass each. In the glare of the small lamp in the night, however, it is a frothy, grey-green liquid, and not very appetizing to look at. My kids pass on the offer to try some.

These are the two large fire pits we dug and prepared with brick and mud last year, and a bamboo and palmyra leaf shelter to cover them. Last monsoon and autumn, they served as shelter from the sun, and a nursery for our winter vegetables. The pits collected a lot of rain water, and we trained pumpkins and other gourds up the roof. Shortly before the cane cutting began this year, the ostad brought his pans and they were secured to the pits with a mixture of mud and cowdung.

Now the juice has to be heated and reduced on a slow fire for hours.

While the first deg begins bubbling, we fill the second one, and that is set to heat as well

All night long, people take turns to periodically stir the juice as it thickens. The initial stage involves skimming off the foam and small impurities that rise to the surface as the juice boils.

Kartik, Prodip, and Priyo took turns feeding the fire and stirring the juice overnight. The heat was brutal during the day, but it was the Holi full moon, and the night was awash in moonlight.

This is the crucial part, the core of the ostad’s skill: “gur namano”, where he tests the consistency of the thickened molasses and decides when exactly to take it off the fire. Too early can mean the wrong texture, and too late can give a slightly bitter taste to the jaggery.

This year, we persuaded our Ostad to try out some liquid molasses. He prefers to make a grainy, viscous jaggery but we wanted to try the liquid one, the much beloved kaakvi as it is known in western India.

When the thickened jaggery has been poured out of the pan, the remaining bits are mixed with some water to make crackle, or toffee

Fresh off the fire, the grainy jaggery looks a rich golden, and is easily pourable. We pour it into sealable tins to store and transport to Kolkata. Gradually it thickens and darkens.

A few days later, the grainy jaggery looks like this, much darker and thicker. Our experience has been that it stays at room temperature for months without spoiling (and our room temperatures are very hot in the high 30s C for much of the year!), but we have to be very careful to not introduce any moisture

Our ustads, Supriyo Ghosh and his father who we only know as Kaku. They are also sugarcane farmers not far from us, and much sought after in the area as expert jaggery ustads.

This is the liquid gur, now packaged in glass bottles

And this is the grainy dana gur, which varies from almost solid to viscous to liquidy in parts

The jaggery is ready for sale

We sell locally from the farm itself, and in Kolkata. If you are in Kolkata and are interested in trying some of our jaggery, here is where you can order it

Many thanks to Prachi for documenting the gur making process. If you have any questions about any of this or about other aspects of the farm I am sure she would be happy to answer them. And, again, if you are—unlike me—able to get your hands on this excellent gur please do take advantage of your opportunity.