Things Muscovado Making and Farming (Part 1)

For the past five years weekends at the muscovado mill has become a part of our family custom. When i was still without a child and the muscovado mill was just starting, i would accompany my parents to the mill. I would help my mother prepare loads and loads of food and utensils to bring to the farm. The farm was without water pump and we had to bring water containers also. It took us some 3 or so years to acquire a truck, and we still didn't have a car either. To reach the farm with all my mother's stuffs we would go by "kuliglig". From 10 am (sometimes earlier) onwards we would be hanging out in the farm while the farmers boil sugarcane juice to turn them into muscovado. If there were peanuts ripe for harvesting we would help harvest them and boil them for afternoon snacks. Sometimes farmers would bring a bunch of sab-a bananas, and that we would eat for snacks, too. During the corn season, we'd get a sackload of native corns. we would bring the extra home and eat it for the next several days.


On mid-day when the sun is at its highest and the temperature at it hottest, we would pass time lying on foldings beds. Those, of course, were also transported from our house in the Poblacion. 

Our family would stay at the mill until about 7 or 8 pm. By the time we arrived home, we would be too full and too tired to take our dinner. i would just help my mother or the household help clean the dishes and utensils we used at the farm. The mill then was without a storage area--it was without walls--and everything we brought we had to carry back home, including the water containers and the folding beds.  

Then next weekend, we would start with the mini diaspora all over again.

In the past, all that I knew of muscovado was that my grandmother use it to make traditional Filipino delicacies on All Saint’s and All Soul’s day in November. When we didn't have any viand, my grnadmother would cook rice porridge sweetened with muscovado, like a champorado. The little muscovado rocks, we ate it like candy. We would play a game on who has the strongest, hardest teeth and the one that could crack a muscovado rock would win. Muscovado was a poor man's sweetener. 


What i also remember was that at least once a year my grandmother’s farm workers would bring a sack or two of pure muscovado, her share as the land owner. I also knew that it came from pressed sugar cane juice and that it is boiled but how it actually becomes muscovado, that I know nothing of.


My parents revived the muscovado making in this little riverside community of our town. My father said that when he was young, the land where our mill stands now was once a river. This time, during our time, nature decided to be kind; the river changed routes, the river beds dried and agriculture flourished. I used to come to the place when i was around 7 or 8 years old and i remember it to be looking like Sahara. Nothing very productive. In the place where the mill stood i first learned to snack on a mix of grated young coconut, muscovado and rice. 


Before my parents built the mill and convinced every farmer to convert to sugarcane planting, every farmer planted rice. It took a lot of convincing and a lot of monetary investment on the part of my parents but sugar-making won the farmers’ hearts. It does not surprise me since my father is a master of politics. 


For the past five years, our mill has also upgraded to a mere open-air, non-walled, non-screened shack of a mill to something that can produce at least “waya-waya” free muscovado.


In mid-February, my parents receive a couple of visitors who came over to learn about the process of muscovado making. They are putting up a similar industry in Souther Philippines, where they're from, and for several tries all they produced were muscovado of not even a marketable quality. I was home and decided to come visit the mill also. I haven’t been there for almost a year. The farmers have almost mastered life around a muscovado community that my parents have stopped micro-managing the mill. February this year is the middle of the milling season. 


Lots of people around--sugarcane owners, mill maestro, farmers wives, their kids, and the farmers’ farm animals—were around. Milling season is always a happy time in the mill because everyone in the community has work and are looking forward to a fruitful year. 

A farmer stockpiling the bagasse (dried pressed sugarcane stalks) near the burner to be used as fuel 

steam from sugar cane juice being boiled (to evaporate the all the liquid)!!

It puzzled my husband so much. he’s been designing sugar mills for some time now. Seeing this, he realized that a very high ceiling should be a default in all his designs. 

How a bagasse is used as fuel – nothing of the sugarcane is wasted. That's the mill's furnace. The collected ashes at the end of the milling season will be used as fertilizer in the sugarcane fields.

What we call here “lasaw”, “pulot” in Hiligaynon, maybe “molasses” in English. It good for pan de sal (literally bread of salt).

Muscovado!

Farmers passing time near the furnace. They’re usually very shy around the camera but they are our family’s friends so when I ask for their pictures they do not hide, they just smile shyly and allow me to snap away. 

The machinery that does the work.

Made in india. Sadly, yes, no foundry manufactures these kinds of machineries anymore and for farmers who want to put up their own sugarmill they have to source their pressers from other countries, such as india, or Europe. I’ll squeal, but yes, my father is planning to get on a project to document the details of this machine. And who knows. The Philippines can manufacture pressers for Filipino farmers to use and we don’t have to scour india or the UK for this really HEAVY metals. 

Yes, very tall coconut trees. In our farm.

More to come!!!