Why We Love Coconut Nectar
Why We Love Coconut Nectar - The Coconut Company
Coconut nectar is a deliciously oozing caramel-coloured sweet delight. It tastes wonderful on toast, stirred into porridge, or used in a recipe such as our Coconut Flapjacks with Cranberries and Apricots. But what is it and why do we rave about it so much?
The joy of coconut nectar
Coconut nectar is a magical sweet stuff. It’s made with minimal processing; what you get in a squeezy bottle is pretty much what it’s like when it comes from the farmer to the factory for packing up and sending out.
What we call coconut nectar is made by first collecting the sap from the coconut tree. This is found right at the top of the tree, in the blossoms which would go on to become the fruit (what you know of as the coconut). We’ve written before about how coconut sap is harvested.
The sap is collected from each tree twice a day by individual farmers. They then use a broad pan to heat the sap to boiling point. As the moisture is heated away, a more concentrated sap remains. The naturally occurring sugars help to caramelise it, and you’re left with the sweet sticky coconut nectar which finds its way to our shelves.
So is coconut syrup the same thing as coconut nectar?
It’s easy to understand why there is confusion around whether coconut nectar and coconut syrup are the same thing. After all, both are syrupy! However, coconut nectar is less processed. All that happens to the sap is boiling it down to a more viscous consistency. With coconut syrup, companies take coconut sugar and add water to it, turning it back into a syrupy consistency. So they are similar, but not the same.
At The Coconut Company, we have to confess that our real love is coconut nectar. It’s purer and a more natural form of sweetener. Of course, honey is another of nature’s bounty of sweeteners, as is maple syrup, so how does coconut nectar compare to the stuff from our friendly bees and maple trees?
Is coconut nectar better than honey? Is coconut nectar better than maple syrup?
We’re not mad fans of making judgment calls on different but all-natural sweet stuff. We’d rather present you with the facts and let you decide which natural sweetener is best for you and which situation.
Honey in its most natural and raw form, is a weighty competitor when it comes to natural sweetness. However, the honey that ends up on our breakfast table isn’t the same thing. This honey is farmed in enormous quantities and undergoes a pasteurisation process that also unfortunately zaps all the wonder stuff it contains, such as minerals, enzymes and the pollen it was made from.
With bees farmed for honey, honey is not vegan-friendly. That immediately eliminates it from a large and growing number of people’s diets. Honey also has a very distinctive taste, and isn’t just ‘sweet’.
Maple syrup is made using the sap of the maple tree. Like with coconut nectar, it is boiled up to evaporate off the water. The syrup is what remains.
Gram for gram, maple syrup has considerably more calories than coconut nectar. However, it also isn’t hugely complicated in terms of processing, meaning that like coconut nectar and unlike processed honey, it retains a high-degree of its original nutrients. Maple syrup contains antioxidants, calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, potassium, manganese and copper.
Again, like honey, maple syrup has a distinctive taste which means you’ll always know that its maple syrup being used as the sweet-element. Great if you want that, not so great if you don’t want such a dominant flavour.
Now let’s consider coconut nectar. Coconut nectar doesn’t have an overbearing flavour. It’s simply quite sweet, a bit like caramel. This means it can be used quite easily when you want the focus to be delicious sweetness, or when you want to carry another flavour such as a particular fruit.
Coconut nectar is minimally processed which ensures that it retains a lot of the natural goodness it came from the tree with. It’s rich in iron and zinc, as well as 17 different amino acids and antioxidants. You’ll also find that it contains vitamins C and B. Indeed, to get the same micronutrients that you’ll find in coconut nectar, you’ll need to eat 17 times as much honey and 282 times as much white sugar!
Lastly, when we are considering who wins the Top Trumps between coconut nectar, honey and maple syrup, we need to look at their relative glycaemic index ratings. That’s quite revealing. The GI rating helps us understand how well our bodies process sugar, and how much it will raise our blood sugar. The lower the better.
Regular white sugar comes in with a GI of around 60. Staggeringly, processed honey’s GI rating can be as high as 72. Even in its raw form, honey ranks between 45 and 65. Maple syrup has a GI of 54. Coconut nectar ambles in with a GI rating of just 35.
So is coconut nectar healthy?
Unfortunately, much that we’d love to be able to say a sweet stuff is ‘healthy’, coconut nectar is still a sugar product, and sugar isn’t exactly a health food. However, it is healthier than many alternatives. All sugars raise your blood sugar to some degree, which is a fundamental thing we want to avoid too regularly.
However, as part of an otherwise healthy and balanced diet, there is always room for balance and the occasional sweet treat. And choosing coconut nectar as the sweetening ingredient of choice, when doing so, is a healthier option than reaching for many other sugars, such as highly refined white cane sugar.
It’s also not solely about health conundrums.
Coconut nectar is an ethical option
For many of us, we care about the provenance of our food and want to make choices that don’t unduly damage the environment or global communities.
When you choose coconut nectar from The Coconut Company, you’re choosing a sustainable sweet option. We source all of our nectar from The Philippines. Individual farmers are fairly paid and supported through benefits such as healthcare, education and assistance programmes. No irrigation is needed, and neither are pesticides or fertilisers, meaning its 100% organic. What’s more, the coconut palm helps offer stability to topsoil and uses minimal land, relative to other crops. Our farmers also use the biomass waste to heat the sap, helping to lower carbon emissions.
Can you now see why we love coconut nectar?
We really do love every oozing drop of coconut nectar. Not just because of its taste and versatility, or even because of its relative health data compared to other sugars, but also because it’s good in terms of ethics and sustainability. Come on over and grab some of your own coconut nectar.