How to Make Pandan Juice and Extract from Pandan Leaves

Pandan juice and pandan extract are used in many Asian recipes. Pandan is a plant that imparts a beautiful green colour and a bread-like fragrance which compliments both sweet and savoury dishes. Maybe you’re unable to find pre-made extract where you live, or you want to make your own natural version free of any additives or colourings. Either way, you can follow this recipe for an easy way to make it from scratch using fresh or frozen whole pandan leaves. Instructions for both pandan juice and pandan extract follow. (This post was originally published circa 2019, but I’m updating it with better instructions and step-by-step pictures. Look forward to some pandan-flavoured recipes forthcoming!)

What Does Pandan Taste Like?

Pandan is a plant native to Southeast Asia that has a distinctive smell, redolent of bread or pastries. The natural compound found in pandan that is responsible for this odour is called 2AP (2-Acetyl-1-pyrroline). The precise flavour of pandan is hard to pin down, but 2AP is also found in foods like jasmine rice, basmati rice, and bread, to give you an idea. Both the fragrance of pandan as well as its bright green colour are beloved in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, the Phillippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Once leached of their life force, the [pandan] leaves are discarded, and what they leave behind is a flavor often described as floral, delicate yet pronounced and almost impossible to explain to those who’ve never tried it. In the West, it has been likened to vanilla but also hazelnut, grass, rose, citrus and pine, although it’s unclear if it actually tastes like any of those ingredients or simply takes on such notes in proximity, chameleonic – or if it is technically a flavor at all, and not pure scent and evocation: of place; of other flavors, other times; of something inchoate and ghostly that disappears before it can be named.

– Ligaya Mishan, The Ethereal Taste of Flowers

By the way, although pandan juice tastes great in recipes, it’s quite bitter and grassy-tasting on its own.

Uses for Pandan Juice

To start with, you can substitute pandan juice for water in any bread or cake. Pandan will give baked goods a nice light green hue and a slightly fragrant taste. Because it’s quite subtle, its flavour works in just about every recipe because it won’t steal the show from other ingredients.

I’ve used it to make adzuki bean buns, crazy cake, and a coconut swirl bread loaf. My mom has also used it to make a pandan cassava cake, a popular Southeast Asian dessert. Something about those flavours, pandan and cassava, work so well together.

And of course, who could forget about the notoriously difficult honeycomb cake which relies on pandan for its eye-catching colour?! This is one dessert I haven’t attempted yet, although it is on my to-bake list.

Other uses for pandan extract:

• Pandan sponge cake
• Onde-onde
• Buko pandan
• Pandan coconut jelly
• Cendol
• Pichi-pichi pandan
• Kue seri muka
• Pandan rice
• Pandan puto

What You’ll Need

Besides water, you will only need one other ingredient for this recipe: pandan leaves.

Where to Find Whole Pandan Leaves

Pandan leaves can be purchased from many Asian supermarkets. I bought mine at T&T here in Canada. They are also ubiquitous in any Filipino grocery store.

You might have to do some close searching because it may be sold under a different name. Pandan goes by many, many other names, including:

• Screwpine
• Rampe
• Annapurna
• 香蘭 (xiang lan)
• Lá dứa

I found pandan labelled “La-Dua” in the refrigerated produce aisle at T&T Waterloo. (It only seems to be there some weeks. I guess the demand isn’t high enough for them to ship in the fresh stuff every week.) In T&T Calgary, I found packages of frozen pandan leaves in the same freezer as other Filipino ingredients like cassava and ube.

Step-by-Step Process

Chop up the leaves into 2-inch segments or shorter. Pandan leaves are very fibrous, which can be tough on blenders as the fibers can tend to wrap around the blade and impede the motor. The smaller the pieces, the easier it is for the blender to break them up. Discard the base of the leaves that don’t look so good.

If you buy them frozen, they may come pre-rinsed and pre-sliced, but I still prefer to give them a quick rinse. Also, the leaves are so thin, that running them under water for a minute will be enough for them to thaw. So you don’t need to wait for the pandan to defrost, instead you can use them straight from the freezer.

Btw, those pale areas of the leaf, usually found in the core, are good to use too. They still have pandan flavour, if not the vibrant colour.

Chuck 1 cup of chopped pandan leaves into a blender and add 1 cup of water.

Blitz on high speed until smooth, then filter the liquid through a fine-mesh strainer or a nut milk bag. Discard the pulp (or see the FAQ on some ideas for using it). Now you have pandan juice!

If you want pandan extract, cover the pandan juice and keep it in the fridge without moving it for 2 days (48 hours). Then, pour off the lighter-coloured top layer (you can discard it or use it in place of water in baking recipes), leaving just the dark green sediment behind. This is your pandan extract. You’ll end up with around 2 tbsp of pandan extract for every cup of pandan juice.

Pandan FAQ

Make Ahead & Storage Tips

Keep homemade pandan juice covered, in the fridge, until ready to use. I recommend finishing pandan juice or pandan extract within two days (48 hours), or it will start acquiring the “off” taste of wilted veggies.

Recipe Card

How to Make Pandan Juice and Pandan Extract

5 from 4 votes

Course: Seasoning

Cuisine: Asian

Prep Time: 10 minutes

Cook Time: 5 minutes

Total Time: 15 minutes

Servings: 1 cup (240g)

Calories: 7kcal

Author: Jellie

Cost: $1.10

Make pandan juice and pandan extract from scratch using fresh or frozen leaves! Pandan adds flavour to many Southeast Asian recipes.

Print Recipe

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Ingredients

• 1 cup chopped pandan leaves 50g; see Note 1
• 1 cup water 240g

Instructions

Unstrained Pandan Juice

• Rinse each pandan leaf thoroughly. Pandan is a little like leek in that they can hide a lot of dirt in between the leaves, especially towards the stem near the bottom.
• Add the rinsed leaves along with 1 cup water to a blender. Blend on high speed until very smooth. You may need to scrape down the sides a few times.
• Pour the blended juice through a nut milk bag or fine-mesh strainer into a container. I find using a nut milk bag to be a little faster, plus it allows me to wring more juice out of the pandan pulp. But a metal strainer works too; just work in batches and press down on the pulp with the back of a spoon to extract as much juice as possible.
• You can use this strained pandan juice to make recipes with higher water content, such as Onde-Onde, Buko Pandan, Cendol, Pandan Coconut Jelly, and Kuih Seri Muka, or use it to flavour rice. Depending on the recipe, you can also swap out part of the liquid in a recipe for pandan juice. If you want a more intense green colour, you should make pandan extract instead, instructions below.

Pandan Extract

• Follow the instructions for Strained Pandan Juice. Leave the strained juice in the fridge for 48 hours, undisturbed, in an airtight jar.
• After 48 hours, you’ll notice the pandan juice has separated into a colour gradient: the bottom layer is a darker green due to the settling of the chlorophyll pigments in the juice. Pour off the pale liquid at the top and you are left with the darker concentrated stuff at the bottom, which is the extract (see Note 2). 1 cup of pandan juice yields roughly 2 tbsp of pandan extract through this method. You can use this pandan extract to add colour to baked goods, such as this Pandan Coconut Loaf.

Video

Nutrition

Calories: 7kcal

Recipe Notes

1. 1 cup (50g) chopped pandan is roughly equivalent to 10 leaves, however, the sizes of individual leaves varies which is why I prefer a weight measurement. Pandan leaves should be chopped into segments no longer than 2 inches. The smaller the pieces, the easier they are for the blender to pulverize.
2. Because we are making pandan juice from pandan leaves with no artificial flavourings or colours, it will be hard to concentrate the product enough to match commercial pandan extract. Though you will need to use more of the homemade extract than storebought extract. As a rule of thumb, for every 1 tsp of storebought pandan extract called for in a recipe, use 1 tbsp of homemade pandan extract.

Nutrition, Cost, and Emissions Information

Each cup of pandan juice is 7 cal and costs $1.10. Currently no carbon emissions data on pandan, sorry.

Calculation for full recipe as written:

Feel free to contact me for sources on the nutritional and carbon emissions information presented here. Note that I am not a nutritionist and guidelines on this page are provided for informational purposes only.