Pandan
A long strap-like leaf used across South-East Asia as an aromatic, giving a grassy, faintly vanilla-like scent. It is used to perfume rice and sweets far more than it is drunk on its own.
Identity
- Botanical name
- Pandanus amaryllifolius
- Family
- Pandanaceae
- Part used
- Leaf
- Origin
- Maritime South-East Asia
- Drunk in
- Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines
Character
Grassy and faintly vanilla-like, often described as the vanilla of South-East Asia. Subtle rather than assertive, and easily lost under sugar.
Notes: vanilla, fresh grass, coconut
History
A cultivated plant with no known wild population — it is sterile and propagated entirely by cuttings, which means the entire crop is clonal. Its distribution follows South-East Asian settlement and trade routes closely.
How it is drunk
Knotted and dropped into rice pots across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Used to colour and scent kuih and cakes, and infused with sugar as a drink in Vietnam and Thailand.
Production
Leaves are used fresh, bruised or knotted to release the aroma. Dried and frozen forms exist and both lose a good deal; freezing keeps more than drying does.
Preparation
Infusion · Decoction
Boiling and decoction
1–3 g/100 ml · 98–100 °C · 10 min
What gets confused
Only one Pandanus species is fragrant — Pandanus amaryllifolius — and the genus is large, so screwpine on a label is not a reliable indication of anything. Most of what is sold as pandan flavouring or pandan extract is coloured and flavoured rather than made from leaf, and the vivid green of commercial pandan cake comes from dye: the leaf itself gives a much softer, greyer green.
Common mistakes
- Buying extract instead of leaves. The leaf gives a rounded grassy vanilla note that the extract approximates and overshoots.
- Using it dried. Pandan loses most of its aroma in drying, and frozen leaves keep far more than dried ones do.
Evidence for this page
This page is TeaHQ synthesis throughout. No external source stands behind any statement on it, including the botanical name. Twenty of the 150 botanicals have had their names and distribution checked against a taxonomic authority and this is not one of them.
Brewing parameters here are typical practice for the category rather than measurements of this plant, and each set says so.
This page makes no safety claim. It describes what Pandan is, where it comes from and how it is prepared — not what it does to a person. The absence of a safety note here is not a statement that the plant is safe. How TeaHQ handles this.