It’s amazing what you can learn from and communicate through hand gestures.

Mot (our driver for the day) spoke limited English, and the lady making the sugar on the side of the road spoke no English.

Even so, we found a way to communicate and understand what she was doing (with her fruits different than we’d ever seen), her giant pot, and her earthen wood stove by the side of the road.

Palm sugar is not something I grew up knowing. In fact, the first time I knew I was actually eating palm sugar was just about 8 weeks ago at the cooking school in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I’m sure I’ve eaten palm sugar in lots of foods… I’d just never eaten or seen it by itself.

I had also never seen how it was made.

Palm sugar comes from a specific kind of palm tree which has a fleshy kind of fruit. The fruit is cut open and then you can eat little pieces of it. The texture is something like a lychee (crunch jello), while the flavor is mildly sweet… something like a sweet water chestnut in flavor.

But if you harvest the nectar from the flowers before they turn into fruit, you can boil the nectar for a few hours, and it becomes sweet and syrupy. If you put that into molds, it will harden as it cools, and the molds can be packaged together and sold as palm sugar.

We bought $1 worth, which was 3 cylinders of packed palm sugar cubes, each about 9 inches long and wrapped and tied in a palm leaf.

It’s amazing to me that just a 15 minute motorbike ride from the relatively modern city conveniences of Siem Reap, thousands of people still live with no electricity and earn their living through selling palm sugar on the side of the road.