Pandan: fresh, frozen, paste or essence

Pandan is sometimes called the vanilla of Southeast Asia, which is a useful shorthand and slightly misleading. Vanilla is sweet and floral. Pandan is grassier, faintly nutty, with something almost savoury underneath, and it works in rice and curries as readily as in dessert.

It also comes in four forms of wildly differing quality, and the gap between the best and the worst is larger than for almost anything else in the pantry.

Fresh leaves

Long, stiff, dark green blades, sold in bundles at any wet market and most supermarkets. This is the real thing and nothing else is quite it.

The aroma is locked inside the leaf and needs to be released. Bruise the leaves: knot them, or run the back of a knife along them, or tear them lengthwise. A whole unbruised leaf dropped into a pot contributes very little.

For rice, two or three knotted leaves go in with the water and come out before serving. For curries and rendang, the same. For desserts, you usually want extract rather than whole leaves.

Frozen

Frozen pandan leaves are genuinely good, and considerably better than most people expect. Freezing damages the cell walls, which in this case helps: the leaves release their aroma more readily than fresh ones do.

They are limp and unattractive when thawed, and it does not matter for anything where the leaf is removed before serving, which is nearly everything. If fresh is hard to get where you are, this is the sensible default rather than a compromise.

Paste and essence

Here is where it gets less good.

Most commercial pandan pastes and essences are principally colouring, with flavouring that ranges from real extract to entirely synthetic. The vivid green of shop-bought kuih is almost always one of these, and it is not what real pandan looks like: genuine pandan extract is a muted, slightly murky green, not the colour of a highlighter pen.

They have their place. Consistent colour matters commercially, and nobody is hand-extracting pandan for a thousand pieces of kuih. But if you are making something at home and wondering why it does not taste like your grandmother's, the bottle is a likely culprit.

Read the ingredients. Some pastes are mostly real. Many are colouring, sugar, and flavour compound.

Heat is the enemy

The compound responsible for pandan's aroma is volatile and does not survive long cooking. This is the single most useful thing to know about the ingredient.

Practical consequences: add pandan late where you can. In rice it is fine, because the cooking is short and covered. In a long-simmered curry, leaves added at the start will have given up most of what they had by the end, so add them in the last twenty minutes instead. In custards and kaya, keep the heat gentle.

This is the same principle as lime at the table, described in balancing the four tastes: aromatics behave differently from flavours that survive heat, and timing is most of the technique.

Where it belongs

Nasi lemak, where a knotted leaf in the rice does as much as the coconut milk for the finished smell. Kaya, where it is the defining aroma alongside gula Melaka. Cendol and its green colour. Kuih of every kind.

And on the savoury side, chicken wrapped in pandan leaves before frying, where the leaf both perfumes the meat and protects it, and in curries where a knotted leaf sits quietly in the background.

It also pairs unusually well with coconut, which is fortunate, since almost everything it appears in contains coconut too.

Storage

Fresh leaves keep about a week wrapped in the fridge, and start to yellow and lose aroma after that. They freeze extremely well: wash, dry, cut into manageable lengths, and bag them. Straight from frozen into the pot, no thawing.

Homemade extract keeps a week in the fridge and months frozen. Commercial paste keeps more or less indefinitely, which tells you something about what is in it.