Es Cendol

Pandan-dyed rice flour noodles, coconut milk, and palm sugar syrup over ice — the Javanese tradition CNN Travel ranked among the World's 50 Best Foods in 2011.

Es Cendol is one of Southeast Asia's most beloved iced dessert beverages, built around the bright green rice flour jelly noodles that give the drink its name and its visual identity. The word cendol refers specifically to these noodles — made by pressing cooked rice flour paste through a perforated mold into cold water, where the resulting drops set into elongated, worm-like shapes — which are colored their characteristic green by extract from pandan leaf (Pandanus amaryllifolius), an aromatic plant used throughout Southeast Asian cooking for both flavor and color. The drink's other components are coconut milk and palm sugar syrup (gula jawa or gula aren in Indonesian), poured over crushed ice to produce a layered dessert drink of contrasting colors: the green of the cendol noodles, the white of the coconut milk, and the dark amber of the palm sugar. Es Cendol's Java origin is the most consistently cited, with the drink spreading from there to Malaysia (where it is commonly spelled cendol), Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam over centuries of Southeast Asian culinary exchange. Palm sugar, produced by boiling the sap of sugar palm trees (Arenga pinnata or Borassus flabellifer), is one of the oldest sweeteners in Southeast Asia and gives Es Cendol's syrup its characteristic dark color and complex, slightly smoky caramel flavor that refined cane sugar cannot replicate. The drink was recognized on CNN Travel's list of World's 50 Best Foods in 2011.