Sugar cane harvested in a whole other world
Last winter, my wife and I realized our dream of escaping the northern hemisphere winter and spending time in warmer climates instead. As a part of our big winter trip, most of last December we stayed with our friend’s parents in their finca in rural Ecuador, not far from Ibarra in the central highlands.
One morning, we woke up to a rain of black ashes falling everywhere. The courtyard floor was already covered by chunks of burnt pieces of vegetation and more and more were floating in the air, landing on every surface available.
As Canadians and residents of British Columbia, our first instinct was to smell the air and look for signs of nearby forest fire. But no such indications. Just those falling ashes.
Naturally, the topic came up in a form of a question for our hosts, the local ex-pats, during breakfast. The answer surprised us; it’s sugar cane fields that are intentionally burnt down to remove the plants’ outer leaves to make harvest easier.
Upon closer look with strong binoculars, way across the valley from the finca, perhaps as far as seven or eight kilometres, we found a field of sugar cane ablaze.
Recurring daily winds carried its ashes over the deep canyon all the way to the finca.
Things started to make sense; why the swimming pool is covered by a roof in a place with perpetually warm weather, why the house employees are asked to sweep the grounds every day, why we are the only ones drying our clothes outside.
The breakfast conversation didn’t end there, though. “You don’t have to cross the valley to see sugar cane harvest up close. Take a short walk toward the main road and on the right you’ll see a hut with smoke coming from its roof,” we were told. “That’s a trapiche.”
It turns out there was quite a bit more to learn about this traditional way of making sugar in Ecuador.
Trapiches, or sugar cane mills, as they are also known, are the traditional South American sugar cane processing facilities. They are not as plentiful as they once were, but in the sugar cane-growing areas, there are still some left.
Many have been upgraded to a near-industrial level, but a few of the small, original, all-manual huts could be still found.
As it happens, the one mere minutes of walking from our finca was one of them. Needless to say, a visit to our local trapiche was in order.
The next day equipped with a camera and a few Spanish words, we headed toward the hut. Once permission to take pictures was granted, we slowly made our way inside the hut and, as respectful observers, took time to look around. The immediate impression was that of an oppressive heat and excess of flying insects. It wasn’t difficult to quickly see that working in a trapiche is hard, back-breaking labour.
Sugar cane has been a traditional crop in many South and Central American countries for centuries. It is still grown in large fields all over the Ecuadorian highlands. In fact, there are a good handful of original real working haciendas around, with main source of revenue coming primarily from sugar cane.
The process of the sugar extraction is surprisingly simple. Once the leaves are burnt and the crops are ready for harvesting, men are hired to chop down the cane stalks with machetes. The cut stacks are then transported to the mill. In the case of our neighbourhood trapiche, the transportation is provided by a small group of dishevelled donkeys.
The cane is then dumped in a large pile outside of the hut and one by one the stalks are pushed through a small mechanical extractor that separates out sticky liquid, locally known as guarapo, from the fibre.
Calling the contraption we saw an extractor might be a bit of exaggeration; however, this home-built greasy, rusting machine powered by a small diesel engine, onceupon-a-time likely a part of a Toyota or Nissan pickup truck, did the job surprisingly well.
The long drive belt demanded respect and extra caution though, as getting caught in the moving parts of this apparatus could be really bad. Two jerry cans with diesel fuel, casually placed close to the open fire of the oven, also caught our attention, but as nobody else seemed alarmed, we too quickly re-focused on the rest of the humble processing facility.
In Ecuador, the extracted sugar cane juice, guarapo, mixed with sour orange or lime juice is sometimes offered as a refreshing drink. Quite thankfully, not in our hut. The guarapo we saw was a light brown liquid full of dead flies and all kinds of other debris from the cane stalks.
Not to be overly obsessed with our western sensitivities and ideas about hygiene — but in this case it was hard to imagine that the product we were looking at is actual food.
The process of making sugar continues by heating up the guarapo until it boils. The heat in the hut is quite overwhelming and the thick wet steam makes visibility limited.
The continuous boiling of the guarapo thickens it, eventually turning it into syrup, known as jarabe. This syrup is then poured into square molds where it’s left to cool off.
Resulting bricks of solid light brown material are called panela and are the actual raw cane sugar.
Once they are knocked off from the cooled molds, they are packaged for sale and shipped to nearby towns’ markets and resellers.
The remaining cane fibre is dried up and later used as fuel in the ovens inside the hut.
As the equatorial sun started to set over the trapiche and the canyon behind it, it was time for us to say thank you to the workers for letting us visit and take pictures, and head back to our finca. The trapiche workers were staying put though, squeezing every last little bit of light from the day and juice from the canes. There were still a few more sugar bricks to be made before these men, too, would finally settle for the night in a nearby barn, completely devoid of any amenities.
And while they were getting ready for the night on bare floors, far away from their families, my wife and I contemplated our luck and privilege of getting to know an Ecuadorian trapiche only as visitors.
These men live a life of real hardship, few westerners could endure.