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Pink Milk and a bottle of Sala Cider syrup. Photo by Scott Zona.
Thai Pink Milk
Pink Milk is a beverage sold at drink stands and juice bars around Thailand. It’s a sweet and refreshing drink packed with enough sugar to power tourists through an afternoon of sight-seeing or locals through a busy workday. The basis of this Thai favorite is Hale’s® Blue Boy Brand Sala Cider syrup. This artificially flavored syrup is produced in Thailand, but it can be found at specialty Asian groceries in the USA. The bright, red (courtesy of FD&C Red 40) syrup can be used over shaved ice or used to flavor ice cream, but it is in Pink Milk that it achieves culinary stardom.
The flavor of Sala syrup is based on Salacca fruits. Two species of Salacca palm are cultivated in Thailand for their edible fruits: Salacca zalacca and S. wallichiana. The fruit of both species has a scaly, reptilian rind that covers a crisp, sweet, cream-colored flesh.
Sala is the common name for Salacca wallichiana fruits. Sala fruits are spindle-shaped and covered with orange-brown scales whose reflexed tips give the fruit rind a prickly texture. There are named cultivars of S. wallichiana that are grown in Thailand for their superior fruits.