Date syrup and date pulp (dibs, silan family)

A date syrup with many names

Date syrup is a thick, dark brown, very sweet syrup extracted from dates. The Arabic names are dibs and rub, the Hebrew silan or dvash tmarim, and the Persian shireh khorma. In English it is called date honey, date molasses or date syrup. The name silan is the common term in Israel.

The product is a sweetener that also works as a glaze and sauce ingredient. It is related to but distinct from pomegranate molasses, which is made from pomegranate juice.

How it is used

In Iran and Iraq date syrup sweetens tahini, usually eaten at breakfast; grape syrup is an alternative. In the Middle East it is rubbed on chicken and potatoes with cardamom, salt and olive oil, coated in sesame and fried or baked, and served as a sauce with stuffed onions and turnips. It is an ingredient in basbousa, a semolina cake.

In Libya it is used widely, usually with asida, a porridge-like dessert. In Algeria it appears in baghrir.

History

Date honey is described as used for thousands of years, and was common in the desserts of ancient Mesopotamia. Rabbinic texts read the honey in Deuteronomy as date honey rather than bee honey. The first-century historian Josephus described date pressing at Jericho's oases, and a date press was found at Qumran.

An archaeological storage jar marked with a palm tree was found in a building destroyed during the siege of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The article cites it as evidence of date honey storage; the contents are not identified.

Making it at village scale

FAO's bulletin on date-palm products describes a Libyan village method for dibs, recorded in a field experiment and reported by W. H. Barreveld in 1993. Dates are boiled with an equal weight of water over a wood fire, the pulp is pressed through a woven basket, and the press-cake is boiled again with more water. The bulletin records four extractions in all, filters the combined juice through cloth, and boils the juice down for a few hours with a piece of date-palm fruit stalk in the pan.

The end point is judged on white sand, not by temperature. A drop of syrup that soaks into the sand is not yet ready; a drop that stays as a small ball is. In the recorded batch, 25 kg of dates gave 12.5 kg of syrup at 67 °Bx. Barreveld judged the outturn poor, with much sugar lost in the press-cake, and noted that blending the dates releases colloidal material that makes the juice hard to separate.

Southern Iraq is recorded in the same bulletin as a regional variant: the juice is pressed under weights and concentrated in the sun in open pans. The Gulf area is recorded as a source of syrup that formed in bagged dates kept in humid conditions. Home-scale quantities, the water used in the later extractions and a home storage time are not given by the source.

Storage and safety

The sources read give no shelf life, water activity or storage temperature. Nutrition claims in the article, such as its magnesium and potassium content compared with maple syrup and honey, are reported as laboratory or small-study findings or marked as needing citation, and are not used on this page.

Open questions

The water added in extractions two to four is not printed. Home-scale quantities and home storage times are not given. The method is documented from one village batch and one field experiment, so it is not a tested home recipe. The Israeli, Palestinian and Gulf production methods are still not established.