Black Walnut Syrup, Part 2: Sap to Syrup

in the first video we learned how to select the trees to put the blankets on the trees and collect the sap and in this video we're going to show you how to take sap and turn it into syrup so let's go [Music] so we don't collect sap every single day the reason we put two gallon buckets on the trees is so that when the weather is not ideal for sap flow we don't necessarily have to go out so what we did over the last three or four weeks is we took snippets of videos here and there and again and tried to put together the process of actually going from sap to syrup so what you'll see is over about a four week period not necessarily the same day well it's a beautiful day out today it's about uh 50 53 degrees and sunny and uh the sap's flowing really good remember we used two gallon buckets because on a good day i get about two gallons we poured about a gallon and a half out of that bucket right there so we're gonna head down to the woods right now probably not as heavy a flow because it's a little shady down there but we'll go down and take a look [Music] we're going to take a quick break from sapping and get the horses fed here although they're already feeding themselves but [Music] get some hay bales hung up here [Music] well that wraps up the sap collection for today we got to bring this up filter it out get it boiling okay the total sap collection today was about 12 gallons pretty good haul we started this batch and we poured a little bit more into it and now we're going to start another pot here i'll get the strainers we don't want to store sap at room temperature we either want to simmer it or we want to keep it really cold so it's either hot or cold and even if it's cold it only lasts a week or so so we try to get it simmering as soon as possible but if the knights are freezing we'll leave them in the buckets outside and just uh let it sit there so we almost got 12 gallons once it blows down a little we'll put the rest of this in so that'll be good so once we get this batch boiled down we'll get it into these jars and these are not sealed or anything like that they're just thrown into the freezer and we'll combine all this together at the end of the season and make one big batch where we can it we put it into the individual serving sizes as well as the bigger serving sizes for our family so for example when i boiled this down i got it up to 72 percent we generally wanted 68 percent if it's too high it'll crystallize it's too low it won't store properly so once we do the final batch at the end of the season with early season late scenes and syrups we'll get that right fine tune right down to that 68 percent and can all that so it's it's consistent so sometimes our sap is frozen when we get it from the trees sometimes we store it outside to let it freeze so that we can do large patches at a time so here ruth is trying to break up some of the ice and what we do here is we melt down the frozen sap and once it's melted down we run it through the filters here we have three different filters of different sizes get all those particles filtered out of there and then it comes into the big pot and this is an eight gallon pot so we're gonna be a little short we're gonna have to boil some of that down before we can put more of this in there but this is the sap boiling process or at least the start of it well this is our makeshift sugar shack we don't we work basically boiling this down inside on the wood burning stove and the propane using a lot of propane uh filling the house with moisture and stuff so we uh threw this together with some cinder blocks and some old cast iron grates that i have so that we could boil it down out here and get it down to about 50 or so uh before we bring it in the house and fine-tune it and it's crude but eventually i'm going to be building a wood shack for the lumber mill for the firewood and then have a sugar shack on the end of it so we could boil this down so i've got wood on the other underneath there and whenever i switch the wood out i pull the end here and then slide wood in from the end this is not high tech it's pretty low-tech in fact and it keeps it hot and then since the ash kind of blows around i take it back off and let that boy okay in this pot we see some sap evaporating and that's sap that we just poured in about an hour ago so you can see how clear it is looks like water with bubbles on top and then in the next pot this has been boiling or evaporating for a couple days and it looks kind of nasty but it's actually beautiful because what all those chunks are are pectin and that comes out of the syrup and so we're going to pour this through a strainer now and we're going to try to get the pectin filtered out and that's going to be our jelly that we talked about and then the syrup down below is going to be our syrup here we go pour it in this way first and then we're going to switch this pot around and try to we've got a bunch on the bottom this is kind of a two-man job for one man and one woman initially because we had about 15 gallons we started with two pots and we had these pots outside to boil it down enough that it could fit into one pot and then we boiled that one big pot down to about half before we brought it inside and put it on the stove because you don't need to be real precise when you start out when it's like water it's really this phase right here that's more critical and that's when you want to put it on a gas stove or something that you can control the heat really well we got that and of course the kids like to lick the bowl okay now we've poured it in and danielle's just gonna work this pectin around a little bit and you can hear the syrup pouring in the pot down below okay we've scraped the pectin down and i'm just going to scoop it into a jar really the more you work this pectin the more syrup is left behind and falls into the pot so we just kind of determine at what stage we like the sweetness and that's the stage we stop at so really it's a personal preference but once i get this out we will return this pot back to the stove so there is jelly and whatever's not eaten hopefully will be frozen and we'll combine that up at the end of the season just like we do the syrup and this is the leftover it's still technically sap it's not actually syrup at this point okay so we've reduced this sap down all the way until it's just a tiny little puddle now we do the rest of this on the propane stove because we really want to control how much reduce it in in the last period of time there now so we've got a brix meter here can you see that oh you can see wow you don't want me um so this measures sugar uh content and it's a based on a percentage of sugar so 60 would be 60 sugar and technically the rest should be water right so uh we want it around 68. if you reduce it and it gets down to about 60 you really want to slow it down because it'll go to 60 to 80 really quick and it kind of gels and it gets hard and basically turns into candy which is nice but we don't want candy we want to serve so what we're going to do here is we act we dipped out a little bit here and we let it cool because this actually is most accurate at 68 degrees so you don't want to take it right out of the heat and throw it on there the other thing you want to do is once it cools you want it to stabilize on the meter here so we want the temperature to stabilize such that the the glass is the same temperature as the syrup here we go got that okay oh i'm gonna have to eat that and i'm gonna have to eat that oh i'm supposed to test this okay so anyway you want to put it up to light if you have sunshine that's great but if not you really want a bright light so i'm gonna walk over here to this kitchen light here i'm gonna do this that light's going to come through there and basically it's going to refract and the scale in here will tell me what it is so we're going to look through here and i'm looking at and and by the way you have to have a really good eye so i'm gonna switch eyeballs here because because i'm old okay so 66 uh okay 66 it's kind of tough because it kind of waffles up and down yeah i'm pretty much looking at a good 66 to 68 so this is probably a good time because we're gonna finish all this up later so if i've got some 66 and some 72 and some 68 i'll mix it all together later and i'll put it right at that 68 where i want it so 66 we're going to stop it so now what we got over here is this was hot so any of you know anything about canning you don't want to pour hot liquid into a cold glass and so we heat up the glass a little bit here so that when we pour it it doesn't break the glass and we're going to have to is this hot hot too or no yeah let's switch these out here okay so you want those to be hot so this is a quart and uh we're just going to pour that on in there and you don't want to spill it because this is liquid gold i'm going to leave a little head space there because we're actually freezing this okay and i don't want it to expand out of the jar so hopefully that's actually that's actually boiling water in there so that should be good i just don't want the glass to break and ruin my beautiful syrup now the next thing you do is you lick the bowl we won't show that on you that's the best part of it is licking the bowl so i'll probably get a little spatula here see how it kind of gels up there on the end it's dripping off there it's like kind of dry it's hard to see yep all right okay so now as you can see each of these jars still has a little bit of syrup in the bottom so what we did was reserve just a tiny bit of sap that i'm now a pure sap that's what you saw me filter just then and we're going to pour it into each of these jars which will help rinse get the rest of the syrup residue out we'll add that and that way we will maximize every possible drop we can from this batch [Music] now we'll simmer this down and we'll soon have finished black walnut syrup well we're standing here with the last few steps ahead of us it's about midnight but i am ready to be done with this so i'm going to try to get it all finished up this evening my syrup is almost ready so i'm going to do a test with the bricks and see if we're there yet i wish you could smell this it smells absolutely incredible in here i'm just trying to cool this down a little bit so i don't put hot syrup onto a glass plate a couple of drops and then we'll wait about 30 seconds to let the temperature stabilize between the syrup and the panels here okay so i am looking for a bricks reading between 66 and 68. and that tells me basically the sugar content that i am looking at in the syrup in order for it to be shelf stable so we are now at 66 percent by the time i get the jars ready this is going to be right where it needs to be so that is perfect okay so we are ready to can up the syrup just like any canning job you do you start with sterile jars and in this case i have put them in some water and warmed it because you never want to put hot syrup or hot substance into a cold jar or you risk breakage so in order to make this shelf stable we want to use syrup that is at least 180 degrees other after that you don't have to do any type of water bath canning and then i've got my warm jars so we're gonna go ahead and start pouring here you can see the finished product here i've got 14 half pint jars and 12 4 ounce jars the one with the white lid there just for whatever reason i couldn't get it to seal i'm not sure what was up so i'm just gonna put that one in the fridge and that'll be the first one we use all the others will seal up and as they cool down by morning i can label them and put them on a shelf to stay lord jesus thank you so much for this day thank you for the abundance of the farm providing food we ask that you would bless this food and may it nourish and strengthen our bodies that we can better serve you in your name we pray amen amen well we've tapped the trees we've collected the sap we've evaporated the sap and it all comes down to syrup

Channel: A Different Way

Views: 75,172

Keywords: collect sap, black walnut, tree sap, home made, syrup harvest, boiling, simmering, pectin

Id: J4G3tS5nM8I

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020