DIY syrup from trees (not just maples)

this video is sponsored by squarespace do you live in one of the world's temperate zones do you have access to a large deciduous tree i.e a tree that loses its leaves in the winter i.e not a pine tree well then there's a good chance you could make some delicious tree syrup like maple syrup but this is not just limited to maple trees you can do it with all kinds of trees for example that is a hickory tree and i use it to make this delicious hickory syrup which is kind of nutty and smoky and delicious and surprisingly different from maple syrup i'm gonna show you how i made it all it took was a bucket a drill and some tubing though honestly you could use a drinking straw and then it took like two hours on the stove but first thing to do is to find an appropriate tree basically all living trees are filled with sweet juice getting that juice is the whole point of being a tree apart from you know making baby trees if you're a tree you suck water up from the ground with your roots and you send it up to your leaves your leaves gather carbon dioxide from the air and from these raw materials you use the energy of the sun to make sugar which provides the calories you need to keep growing so you can suck more water up from the ground with your roots and send it up to more leaves that gather carbon dioxide etc etc etc and eventually you make baby trees and eventually you die it's kind of like being a person anyway maple trees are particularly popular for tapping as it's called because the sweet juice is particularly tasty in maple trees it is particularly easy to get it is particularly abundant and the trees themselves are particularly abundant across the vast temperate expanses of north america where native peoples first learned how to tap that the sugar maple is so named because it's probably the best tree for doing this but black maples and red maples and silver maples and lots of other maples are apparently great for making syrup too i can find no scientific literature that comprehensively describes or lists all of the various tree species that can be safely tapped it's probably a thing that not anybody really knows all the answers to yet however if you google online you will find communities of people who have successfully and apparently safely tapped boy all kinds of hardwood species i.e not pine type trees and these folks have apparently tapped that and lived to tell the tale however it is certainly the case that there are deadly poisonous trees out there and before we consider eating any of their parts we must all do our research right consider the manchineel tree of the tropical americas the tiniest drop of its milky white sap causes horrific burning and blistering on your skin so you really wouldn't want that on your throat would you a much less dramatic example would be an oak tree like the one behind you you could very easily if you were a noob confuse an oak tree for a maple tree if you were just going off of the bark in winter you didn't have leaves to compare oaks contain tannins that taste bitter and can be toxic in very large quantities sometimes you hear about dogs or horses eating a ton of acorns and getting sick you have to process acorns to make them safe to eat i can find no scientific literature on the safety of oak syrup i have read about people who claim to have made it and eat it and what they said was that it was just kind of so gross and bitter that they stopped eating it long before they were presumably in danger of being poisoned by it evolution it works on the other hand i have read about people who say that they like to tap a few oak trees in addition to a much larger stand of maple trees it's called a sugar bush if it's a stand of trees used for tapping anyway they like to mix a little bit of oak sap in with their much larger quantity of maple sap for the purposes of making the finished maple syrup taste a little bit nutty tannins can be quite tasty in small quantities hence red wine but i don't know oak syrup isn't really a thing from what i can see so i wouldn't do it if i were you but birch syrup is a thing or actually birch sap the raw unreduced liquid you tap out of birch trees its sugar content is absurdly low so you could not boil much syrup out of it but the raw sap is often marketed as birch water and is apparently a refreshing beverage lots of common fruit and nut trees are reputed to make outstanding syrup and in fact the very best syrup i ever had was from a black walnut tree that's my brother tony rogucia he has a youtube channel about bonsai tiny trees but that big tree behind his house in pennsylvania is a black walnut and tony tapped that to make this syrup that i got to try last time i was up there and it tasted like browned butter you can find black walnut syrup on the internet and i highly recommend trying it you can also buy hickory syrup though much of what's on the market is just sugar syrup that has been infused with hickory bark however people do actually make real hickory syrup like this and that gave me confidence to try i also am confident because i know this area this ground this is my backyard in east tennessee and i know there's no particular problem with groundwater pollution or anything potentially hazardous like that so i felt competent to tap that just as soon as i had conclusively identified that as a hickory tree i examined its bark i examined its leaves i examined its nuts tree identification is a pretty easy thing to google and i'm 99 sure this is a hickory you identify and tap your own trees at your own risk you also want to make sure that it's a pretty big pretty mature tree a common guideline out there is that it should be at least about a foot wide of the trunk and then you also want a tree that is ideally exposed to the southern sun here in the northern hemisphere especially in the winter time the sun is going to be on the southern side of the skies the south is that way the sun is rising behind you so this is a well-sided tree that's why i first started considering tapping this particular tree it's very exposed on its southern face sun makes the sap run so you're looking for a very specific weather report a string of days in late winter early spring when it's going to be well below freezing at night and well above freezing during the day those are fahrenheit temperatures by the way if you're confused and they are perfect for tapping tennessee here is probably one of the most southern places where it's even viable to tap trees you keep going south eventually you get into the sub-tropical regions where it just does not get cold enough at night to make the sap run unless you go way farther south to the southern hemisphere where they are currently experimenting with maple syrup production in new zealand pretty neat but anyway you gotta have those cold nights and warm days like we start getting here in tennessee in late january now this is when tapping season begins here however people do tap trees in the fall it's possible however there's a lot of consensus that that's just not optimal you're not going to get as much syrup out of the trees if you tap them in the fall the tree has a whole annual life cycle right where parts of the year it's going to be storing more of its energy as starch rather than sugar and all that kind of stuff winter going into spring is probably best so yeah i noticed i had a string of frigid nights and warm days coming up and i knew it was time i followed these tips for backyard maple syrup producers assembled by the university of new hampshire where they know from syrup it's linked in the description i'm using a quarter inch drill bit like six millimeters that's on the small side you can go a little bit bigger and you drill into the tree at a slight upward angle this is just so gravity helps you out and you don't get sap pooling at the back of the hole i'm going maybe an inch and a half deep less than four centimeters again people do go a little deeper but i want to be conservative about my tree's health which might not be very good you might have noticed that i'm not the only animal boring holes in this bark you also might have noticed this black stain on the trunk this could be caused by insects it could be caused by bacteria wet wood from what i've read it's unlikely to be anything that'd be harmful to me however i would say that if i was going to be tapping multiple trees i would want to sterilize my drill bit before i went drilling in another tree because i don't want to be spreading diseases around anyway there's my hole on the southern side of the tree the part that faces the sun during a winter's day that's going to help and it's already leaking sap which is good sap is drizzling down the bark which is bad conventionally you jam a little tap in there that's called a spile tapping spiles are cheap but they can be hard to find in contrast every hardware store sells tubing approximately quarter inch tubing i've got here this is for an ice maker so it's food grade plastic but honestly you could do this with a fat drinking straw which is also a food grade obviously we just need to get the sap flowing out and away from the bark and we need something to catch it in if you have a really long tube you could potentially just send it all the way down to the ground where you could have like a cooler on the ground or a bucket on the ground however traditionally what you do is you actually hang the bucket up on the tree on the spile that is also the spout i just bought one of these little screw hooks at the hardware store i'll screw that in by hand right above my tube and there i can hang my bucket like so obviously don't use a bucket that is not food safe i'll drape that with something just to keep too much debris from falling in when the bucket is up on the tree like that it's less likely that somebody's going to knock it over and that's nice but since i have some long tubing i'm thinking i might drill a second hole on a big tree you can tap two separate points at the same time without hurting the tree though it's good to keep the holes kind of far away from each other so long tube from there down to the bucket we are bored as you can see the sap is already flowing even though it's the end of the day sunset which is not when the magic happens the real magic happens after a long sub-freezing night and then the sun comes up the next day the kind of late winter sun that makes it uncomfortable to wear a coat while the late winter air makes it uncomfortable to not wear a coat that sun rapidly heats the south-facing part of the tree that we've tapped and what happens next is surprisingly complicated maybe we'll talk to a real scientist about it another day pressure builds up inside the tree as it warms it has to do with gas expansion and such the temperature shock effectively squeezes sap out of the tree's circulatory system and there's the water with a small amount of dissolved sugar and other nutrients in it that we call sap when the sap really starts to flow down like that it's called a run and the run could last anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days i gave it one day yes we're technically bleeding the tree a little bit and how that really affects the tree's health long term is a subject of continuing scientific investigation but the prevailing view is that two or even three tap holes once a year is perfectly safe for a big tree just as you and i can donate some blood every now and then and we're perfectly fine their trees people have been tapping for a hundred years and they're fine this one i've tapped for 24 hours coming up on sunset again and we've got about a gallon and a half of sap sap with bugs in it it tastes like water with only the slightest hint of sweetness but hey the tap is still running i could have gotten more and you can get multiple runs per season from the same tap holes you just leave the tubes and hang your bucket when the weather forecast looks right i'm passing this through a coffee filter to get out the bugs and bits of bark cheese cloth would work instead one thing to keep in mind is that the raw sap like this will spoil easily it's very hospitable to microbial life so they say you got to treat it like milk it either needs to stay cold or you need to heat it up which is what we're going to do it's conventionally done in super wide pans to maximize surface area for evaporation which is why i'm using my widest pan even though it's not my deepest pan so i can only fit in a little bit at a time after about a half hour of boiling i can pour some more in and repeat this took about two hours of hard boiling an astounding amount of energy can you imagine doing this over a fire there's a reason maple syrup is synonymous with canada an immense country with immense forests big enough to tap for sap but also to burn as firewood to yield syrup finally we're getting to syrup the basic ratio for reducing maple syrup is about 40 to 1. 40 parts raw sap to make one part syrup and my hickory syrup here seems to have required at least that much reduction if you don't reduce it enough it won't be shelf stable too much water for microbial life if you reduce it too much it won't be syrup anymore it'll become granulated sugar at normal atmospheric pressure you generally hit the right sugar concentration at 219 fahrenheit 104c let's see what happens if we go beyond that check it out the syrup is seizing it's crystallizing which could be a good thing that's granulated hickory sugar right there yum but i'll dissolve that again with some water and that is just so darn tasty though the texture is a little rough a little sandy that could be from the crystallization but it could also be this stuff called sugar sand that sand is also called nighter it's minerals from inside the tree sap that got concentrated through the reduction and they precipitated out of the solution and formed little teeny tiny rocks the professionals after they finished boiling their syrup and it's still hot so it's still really fluid they will filter it to get out all of the sugar sand for doing that at home you're gonna lose a lot in the filter and this is so precious i mean look at the meager yield i got out of that gallon and a half of sap so i figured just deal with it it really does not bother me much at all no it doesn't bother me at all and you know it's a homemade natural rustic product and so it should be equally ubiquitous as tree sugar but far easier to extract is a beautiful website from squarespace just as a tree syrup can be a beautiful expression of your local environment a website from squarespace can be an expression of you a place where you get to tell the world about who you are what you have to offer maybe run your business all on your own territory your own terroir i'm talking about a space that you own where you set the rules instead of an account on some social media platform where you are subject to the whims of some man behind the curtain what's up algorithm everything you could want to do on those platforms you can do with a squarespace website you can post paywalled content from text to video you can fundraise you can sell physical products of course you can let clients schedule appointments with you you can showcase yourself and your work and you can use search optimization and analytical tools from squarespace to gather an audience and you can work hand in hand with your social accounts squarespace handles everything including hosting the site and registering your domain name you can build a site for free but when it's time to publish save ten percent with my code regocia at checkout you'll be doing me a solid thank you squarespace and thank you trees the list of wonderful things we get from you is as long as the network of xylem through which your delicious sap flows

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,350,150

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Id: rT9IJXuHbKs

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 31 2022