You can read a coconut tree like a document. Smooth bark means a tree never tapped; notched footholds, called khapa in Goa, signal a history stretching back to Portuguese-era law, when every plantation palm was required to be tapped. “All the old marked trees are at least 50 years old,” says Hansel Vaz of Cazulo Feni, who tends a 160-acre farm he revived from decline, “and that points to a serious problem: an ageing population of coconut trees, and very few new ones being planted.”
The notches also record who climbed and how, hands-up for the coconut plucker, toes-first for the toddy tapper, who moves before dawn because the sap waits for no one. That first collection, around 4.30am, yields neera/nira, known as kallu in Kerala, the drink that sustained fishing communities along the western coast, sold from green carts at Mumbai’s railway stations, that everyone’s grandfather drank and no one mentions at dinner.
That is beginning to change as a small cohort of chefs and producers are arriving at toddy and its by-products like neera, palm vinegar, palm jaggery and paani, from a different direction. They are coming from the pantry, and not the bar.
Toddy’s oldest function in the kitchen was as a leavening agent. In Goa, soft, pillowy steamed rice cakes, known as sanna and central to coastal cooking, were traditionally fermented with fresh toddy. What made it work was precisely what makes toddy difficult: the live yeast, the brief shelf life, and the way the flavour shifts by the hour. In modern kitchens like the Grand Hyatt Mumbai, chef Neeraj Tyagi uses lightly fermented coconut milk often as a substitute for the sanna.
Vaz found a different approach almost by accident. At Cazulo, if a batch of toddy isn’t good enough to go into coconut feni, it gets converted into vinegar. The farm now operates as what he describes as a zero-discharge system where coconut sap comes into the distillery, and nothing leaves as waste. “There’s an enormous demand for palm vinegar right now, and it just found its way into kitchens,” adds Vaz, who sells it only via word of mouth.
Palm vinegar is made by allowing toddy to ferment and then acetify, a process that takes about a month. It is softer than cane vinegar and earthier than rice vinegar, with a faint sweetness. At The Westin Hyderabad Mindspace, executive chef Ashfaque Ali uses it as a reduction sauce alongside palm jaggery. Its bright, fermented acidity cuts through the richness of a glaze, doing what a sharp European wine reduction might, but with a deeper coastal character.
Neera presents a different set of possibilities. It is neither juice nor toddy. It’s mildly sweet and floral, and fades within hours of leaving the tree.
Nell Neemuch, a Goa-based coffee brewer who grew up drinking neera from railway station carts in Mumbai, spent years trying to find a way to work with it. The problem was always the same: once opened, it ferments fast. She eventually found a vendor who pneumatically packages and sterilises the sap, halting fermentation. The shelf-stable neera is now the sweetener in her cold brew Nira Cold Brew Coffee, which has a low-glycaemic sweetness and faint botanical note. It is available at neera stalls spread across Maharashtra, especially Mumbai.
Further up the supply chain, the challenge isn’t stability, but sourcing. Chef Regi Mathew, founder-partner of Kappa Chakka Kandhari in Bengaluru and Chennai, and Chatti by Regi Mathew in New York City, uses toddy to ferment rice batters and serves it on the bar menu in New York. He works with paani, a Palmyra palm toddy reduced over wood fire until it thickens to an amber syrup the consistency of honey. With it, he makes pazham nanachathu, a dessert of sun-dried bananas, paani, and fresh coconut rooted in Kerala’s zero-waste domestic tradition. “Paani doesn’t just sweeten the dish,” Mathew says. “The wood-fired reduction gives it a depth that refined sugar or jaggery can’t replicate.”
The logic of palm jaggery as a stand-in for harder-to-source sap products extends beyond Indian kitchens. At Lisa’s Lanka in Mumbai, chef Lisa Sadanah uses it as the closest approximation of kithul peni, the prized syrup tapped from the kithul palm in Sri Lanka. In her crème brûlée, palm jaggery is infused with nutmeg and cinnamon, finished as a crackling crust: the flavour architecture of a Goan bol, a coconut and jaggery cake, or a Sri Lankan wattalapam (spiced coconut pudding).
At Hosa in Goa, chef Harish Rao makes an ice apple prawn curry drawn from a memory of a fishing home in Puducherry. What stayed with him was an addition of toddy in the gravy, a gentle tang that rounds off the broth. Since fresh toddy is unreliable to source, he makes a small batch in-house.
What these chefs are navigating is an ingredient ecosystem that was not designed to reach the restaurant kitchen. “Coconut vinegars are gaining visibility, especially in Goa,” says Payal Shah, founder of Kobo Fermentary and fermentation lead at The Good Craft Co. in Bengaluru, “but they are locally produced and do not travel easily. Accessing good-quality products outside their regions remains genuinely difficult.” She has been working with panna jaggery, a smoky palm sugar from Kerala, as an alternative sweetener, and has also made coconut vinegar from neera jaggery. She sees the efforts as real, but early where interest is building without the infrastructure to match it.
The knowledge exists. The trees are marked. What’s changing is simply who is paying attention.
Insia Lacewalla is a Goa-based food and travel writer.