Why dates are healthier than sugar – but can you tell Medjool from Barhi or Halawi varieties?
Popular gifts at religious events like Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr (the end of Ramadan), dates are now catching on outside the Muslim world, partly due to their lower glycaemic index.
Ten years ago when dietitian and chef Renée Chan started her healthy food brand True Nosh – rebranded as Ah Nui Asian Foods a few years ago – she was determined to avoid adding sugar and instead use a natural sweetener. She turned to dates.
“I wanted to be a diabetes-friendly company, as my dad had diabetes [and passed away before her high school graduation],” she explains. Chan started using dates extensively in her cooking and baking. “I mainly use Deglet Noor dates because they’re bulkier, so they thicken my sauce a little bit better without making it too sweet [like Medjool dates],” she says.
In her experience, one Medjool date is equal to about one teaspoon of sugar, while three to four Deglet Noor dates is about one teaspoon of sugar.
Chan puts them in the blender to create a paste, and recommends not adding water, as that can cause the date paste to go mouldy quicker. She uses the date paste in many of her health food products, such as granola, plant-based hoisin or oyster sauce, and XO sauce. When cooking, she also adds date paste to all kinds of Thai curries instead of palm sugar, and in the ground black sesame filling in tong yuen.
“I teach a cinnamon bun class and for the paste that you roll in the middle, I use cinnamon, date, water and butter,” she says. “Dates are great when making banana bread, zucchini bread or carrot cake,” she says, adding she makes bread with dates too.
“The yeast needs a little picker-upper when you rehydrate it. Usually it’s sugar in warm water. But I blend the dates with warm water and then add the yeast so it becomes like a date juice, so the bread turns out slightly darker. You can see the speckles, which makes it healthy looking.”
Dates are not only a good source of fibre, but are also low in fat, have 50 per cent more potassium by weight than a banana, and have other nutrients like copper, magnesium, vitamin B6, calcium, vitamin K and iron.
The oval-shaped fruit has been cultivated for thousands of years in the Middle East, and today there are some 1,500 varieties grown in places including northern Africa, Australia, South Asia and California, although the top producers are Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Iran.