Moliendo Caña

August 17, 2022

One of this region's historical cash crops is sugar cane. If you have never seen sugar cane, it is often planted on hillsides very tightly together and looks a bit like a blend between thin bamboo and corn stalks. When mature, the cane blushes a slight reddish-pink color. Traditionally, the cane is harvested in the morning and ground that same day into panela (raw sugar) by a large contraption called a molienda. Historically the molienda was powered by donkeys or horses; now most farmers have an electric motor that shares a likeness to a motorcycle motor and speeds the process greatly. My friend Lucia remembers her father dozing on his circling horse in the predawn mornings and herself nodding off at her desk after getting up early to help grind before school Even still, processing sugar cane takes most of the day.

This Saturday, Lucia arranged with a family living in the rural outskirts of the next town over for us to partake in a day at the molienda. Our destination was Malqui, a tiny rural community boasting a two-room schoolhouse with just over thirty kids, grades 1-4 in one classroom 5-8 next door. Luckily, we didn't have to do all the early morning work of harvesting and prepping the cane, and when we arrived around 11am -- a large group of excited participants, including city folk cousins from Quito possibly with kids more out-of-place than ours -- the cane was mostly ground, the wood-burning fire was already smoldering and the big vat of sugar cane juice was just beginning to bubble.

We were four trucks and carloads full. And when I say full, I mean over capacity. Our boisterous arrival was delayed several times over by multiple stops along the route to collect ripe plantains to drop into the boiling sugar juice, roasted peanuts for candy making, lemon to add to sugar cane juice, cheese to dip into the warm panela syrup, bread and a long litany of other staples to keep us fed and happy for the long day. 

We were quite the crew, including some family members with a lot of experience grinding and cooking panela and excited to share their knowledge, some with less skill but more enthusiasm, and others (like my family) just along for the ride. The boys spent a large chunk of the long wait playing in the river and on the roof of the schoolhouse.  Brynna found plenty of oranges to eat, animals to pet, and was anxiously awaiting the moment all day when we could pull taffy (like she has read about in her beloved Raggedy Ann books). 

Much of the day was spent staring at the bubbling vat, snacking, gabbing, stirring the cane juice, feeding the wood-burning fire, and having heated debates about who would determine when it would be ready, how hot to keep the fire, how to remove the plantains for consumption, etc. In the end, like most family affairs, it turned little intense, becoming a mad dash of perfectly synchronized steps: first, the doling out of syrup into a myriad of buckets and pots that appear from behind each person's back, then the dropping of sweet candy into the hollowed out trunks of banana trees to be adorned with peanuts and pulled and wrapped in prepped banana leaves. All the banana tree parts were prepped carefully by wacky Aunt Ceci, as usual working ceaselessly on some project that we chuckle at but eventually appreciate. And, finally, at the very last, mad shoveling, stirring and turning over (think Olympic curlers with their brooms) of the final product, the panela with over-sized wooden spoons the size of Brynna. 

Yes, we successfully ground sugar cane on Saturday. We overindulged all day in all its sweetness, and we even made it home by nightfall, our tummies full of sugar, our arms full of melcocha (the banana-leave wrapped chewy candy), miel (the thick syrup) and panela (the dry crude sugar).