Pandan extract substitutes

The real thing in its original form, and the only substitute that actually tastes of pandan. Frozen leaves from an Asian market work almost as well as fresh and are far easier to find. Blending gives a stronger, greener extract than steeping.

Best for

buko pandan, pandan chiffon cake, coconut rice and desserts, kaya jam, drinks and syrups

Prep

To steep, knot the leaves and simmer them in the recipe's coconut milk or milk for 10 to 15 minutes, then remove. To blend, chop them and blitz with 3 tbsp of the recipe's liquid, then squeeze through a fine sieve or muslin.

Two adjustments. The colour is a pale natural green, nowhere near the electric green of bottled paste, so a chiffon cake will look ivory rather than green. And blending adds water, so subtract whatever liquid you used from the recipe. Steeping adds no water but extracts less aroma, so use three leaves rather than two.

This is the most common real confusion behind the search, so worth stating plainly: paste and extract are not the same strength or the same product. Paste is thicker, more concentrated, sweetened and almost always contains added green food colouring. Extract is thin and often nearly clear.

Best for

pandan chiffon cake, buko pandan, any recipe where the green colour matters

Prep

Stir it into a small amount of the wet ingredients first so the colour distributes evenly, then add to the batter.

Start with half as much paste as the extract the recipe calls for, taste, then add more a quarter teaspoon at a time. Paste will colour the batter far more strongly, which is usually what people want. Going the other way, if you have extract and the recipe says paste, use twice as much and add green colouring separately, or accept a pale dessert.

The best imitation you can build from a Western baking cupboard. Pandan's aroma sits somewhere between vanilla, fresh hay and coconut, and combining coconut and vanilla lands closer to that impression than either does alone, particularly in a coconut-based dessert like buko pandan.

Best for

buko pandan, coconut desserts, ice cream, custards and puddings

Prep

Add both with the wet ingredients, plus a drop of green food colouring if the dish is supposed to look green.

It gets the sweet, creamy, tropical impression and misses the green grassy top note entirely, which is the note that makes pandan recognisable. In a dessert that already contains a lot of coconut it passes easily. In a pandan chiffon cake, where pandan is the only flavour, it reads clearly as coconut-vanilla.

The single most available option, and honest about what it does: it fills the aromatic slot in the recipe with something pleasant. Pandan is often described as tasting a little like vanilla, and in a background role, such as a rice pudding or a syrup, nobody will feel something is wrong.

Best for

rice puddings, custards, sweet sticky rice, drinks, recipes where pandan is a background note

Prep

Add with the wet ingredients, plus a drop or two of green food colouring if appearance matters.

The result tastes of vanilla, not pandan. It lacks pandan's grassy, faintly savoury edge, which is what keeps a pandan dessert from being cloying, so the finished dish reads sweeter and more one-dimensional. Do not use it where pandan is the headline, such as pandan chiffon or pandan kaya.

Use this for one reason only: colour. Matcha delivers a strong natural green plus a grassy vegetal note that is, at a squint, in the same territory as pandan's. It is the best way to get a green cake without artificial colouring.

Best for

colouring cakes and chiffons green, ice cream, when combined with vanilla for flavour

Prep

Sift it and whisk it into a little warm liquid to a smooth paste before adding, or it clumps.

It tastes clearly of green tea, with tannin and a bitter finish that pandan does not have, and too much turns a dessert astringent. Combine a quarter teaspoon of matcha for colour with a teaspoon of vanilla for aroma and you get closer than either alone. Guests will say green tea, not pandan.

The truthful answer for when pandan is the point of the recipe. Nothing tastes of pandan except pandan, and an imitation built from vanilla and food dye in a pandan chiffon cake produces a green vanilla cake, which some people would rather not make at all.

Best for

pandan chiffon cake, pandan kaya, any recipe named after pandan

Prep

Increase whatever the dish's other aromatic is, and skip the colouring.

If the dish is defined by pandan, either find frozen leaves, which almost every Asian grocer stocks, or make a different dessert this weekend. If pandan was one aroma among several, as in many coconut puddings and rice dishes, leaving it out and leaning on the coconut is a clean result rather than a compromised one.