Pandan Is the ‘Soul’ of Houston’s Summery Desserts

Native to Southeast Asia, this tropical leaf makes for the perfect late-summer treat in Texas

Summer in Houston brings a slate of refreshing flavors to the city: Bright salads are sprinkled with peak-season fruits, while ice cream shops offer cooling sorbets in lip-puckering flavors like lemon and grapefruit. But one flavor with a unique staying power and a heavy dose of nostalgia for Houston is pandan.

Native to regions in South and Southeast Asia, the essence of this tropical, green blade-shaped leaf is a lightly sweet, slightly earthy, vanilla-like flavor; it can also act as a natural food coloring. In Houston, home to one of the largest and fastest-growing Asian populations in the country, pandan desserts grace the menu of several restaurants. There’s refreshing pandan iced tea at Filipino restaurant Be More Pacific, pandan coconut mocktails at Phat Eatery, green-tinted pandan waffles at Bambu, and icy pandan kakigori with chunks of coconut at new Japanese hand roll spot Kira.

“I know Southeast Asian folks see it and know what it is, but I think pandan is going to continue to grow in the sweet world with Asian-inspired, bright green Instagrammable desserts,” says Kevin Villaneuva, the chef behind Vuji Cafe. The Heights sandwich shop, which layers Asian diasporic flavors on Texas toast, serves pandan ginger cold brew and its answer to a traditional PB&J sandwich — an ube pandan sando made with fluffy marshmallow, crisp Japanese wafers, and a creamy ube pandan filling.

Vuji Cafe’s ube pandan sandwich wiith pandan and ube foam, marshmallow, wafers, and strawberries on Texas toast.

The sweet-leaning surge of pandan in Houston has been a welcomed reprieve from the season’s sweltering temperatures. For many in the Southeast Asian community, pandan is the “soul” of desserts — a natural and common replacement for sweeteners and manufactured food coloring, says Lukkaew Srasrisuwan, who owns Thai restaurants Makiin and Kin Dee. “Pandan really is the Thai version of vanilla,” she says.

Srasrisuwan has made Kin Dee’s iconic pandan cake for nearly 30 years, starting at her family’s gas station bakeries in Southern Thailand. Though more Western-style desserts like cheesecake and classic chocolate cakes were popular (back then, “anything imported was more important,” she says), Srasrisuwan decided to keep her roots, pressing chunky pandan juices into the cake’s batter to give its moist layers a light green tint and sweet flavor before topping it with an airy frosting made from whipping young coconut milk. “It’s not too sweet, and I love that,” she says.

Though it’s not unusual to draw out pandan’s flavor by tying its leaves together and dumping them directly into a simmering savory dish, pastries call for a different process. Srasrisuwan says a combination of smashing and cold-pressing-like techniques helps extract its juices for drinks or batters. Others roll pandan’s smashed, mushy remnants into a ball for safekeeping throughout the season. In Houston, where pandan is rare unless imported from Florida or California, those who have trouble securing it fresh might opt for a bottled extract or powdered version that few purists trust, Srasrisuwan notes. “It looks too green to be real,” she says.

Kin Dee

Still, the leafy ingredient seems to be reaching a high point at Houston restaurants, most often paired with flavors like ube or young coconut — a latter combination one that balances pandan’s earthy sweetness with the coconut’s refreshing juice and soft jelly flesh, which can be used as a smooth, creamy vessel or foundation for nearly any dessert. Along with her mango sticky rice, made with a verdant sweet coconut rice infused with pandan, Srasrisuwan has sold the pandan cake since Kin Dee’s opening. In time, the cake developed its own cult following.

“It makes it so nice for summer,” she says.