Re-entering the Kitchen: Au Naturel Food Flavouring-cum-Colouring

*tongue-in-cheek* This post is dedicated to Amantha who almost poisoned herself by consuming multiple artificial colourings. :P

I was browsing for recipes on the Internet recently and chanced upon this lovely food blog called ‘Table for 2 or more’. The author has a good collection of recipes using natural pandan juice which caught my fancy. But first, I need to learn how to extract pandan juice. Here’s the link to her blog on this topic.

I bought a pack of 50 cents worth of pandan leaves from NTUC and started my first pandan juice extraction. As mentioned in the link to the method above, it is better to snip away the tip of each leaf due to tiny thorns on its lower surface which might prick the skin when squeezing the juice out with your bare hands. After washing and cutting away the undesirable portions of the leaves, I’m left with about 12 g of pandan leaves. Hence, I used only 1/2 cup of tap water for blending the leaves.

Ready for some blending action!

 

Blended pandan leaves - just before squeezing
After 1st squeeze
Freshly squeezed pandan juice - 1st extract
After standing in the refrigerator for 24 hours.

After the first squeeze, I repeated with another squeeze using 1/2 cup of water. And I repeated again for a 3rd squeeze. I collected the pandan juice in 3 separate containers (from the 3 consecutive squeezings) and refrigerated them for use within the next few days. If you want concentrated pandan juice (e.g. for making pandan chiffon cake), use the bottom green sediments shown above. :)