Meet the Mennonites Behind One of the World's Best Syrups

there is really a muddy pond it's just a small hole and it's muddy all the time it is very much a Mennonite community we the Gunther family my parents and my grandparents moved here in 1965 it was strictly horse and buggy crosscut saw an axe teenage boys growing up said we've had enough of this and went and bought some chain saws and one thing to the next and today it's all modern I guess the only one that actually works or uses horses and mules is my dad and myself everybody else has gone modern I grew up in that sorghum making I remember as a 6 7 8 year old boy I could hardly stand to go to school I would rather go to the cane fields Griffin cut cane as I got to be near 20 years old I said there's just no way that I'm going to be able to make a living with this and I said I'm gonna go find me another job and I ventured out and found out that the world is a mean place if you didn't know what you were doing and decided that what Dad had going back home with the sorghum making that I'm gonna step in there and I'm gonna convert this from the old timey horse-drawn ways and I'm going to build some equipment so that we can be profitable with this and make more sorghum and better sorghum I was full fledge back into it and have never looked back sargam grows here in four months and no matter how much you cook it or what kind of a process you do to it you cannot boil it into sugar all it does is boils down and makes a thick sweet syrup the misconception about sorghum versus molasses although everybody calls sorghum molasses but it's actually sorghum cane and because of that it seems like sorghum has always been somewhat the underdog sorghum is very high in iron antioxidants potassium and it's just a much healthier sweetener for you guarantee you it will not make you fat but I will tell you the butter and biscuits will get you I live to promote sorghum I guess that's my passion in life and with all my being I promote that I haven't kept track of it recently but I eat somewhere around five to seven gallons over a year there are other people that make sorghum and I'm not going to criticize anybody's sorghum I think all sorghum is good it's just like sex it's all good some is just better than other there is no equipment built out there it all has to be built in-house you either learn to do this work yourself or you go to town and get yourself a job and I guess it's something that my dad instilled in us boys that when it's autumn season nothing else matters the juice to syrup ratio is approximately ten to one it takes 18 to 20 minutes to flow across that pan and then the juice flows out into a bucket which is connected to a pump which pumps the hot sorghum over an airflow and into this holding tank that we have here and then from here it's put in jars I'm gonna get my plate and put sorghum on it to have my breakfast I'm going to say I might be a little excessive with it but it's my sorghum I'm going to eat all I want hmm that is so good at our operation lots of visitors come by and there is nothing that catches their eye more than a horse going around in a circle so we keep a horse hitched up there and press out cane old-fashioned way and for the most part my dad runs that it takes a lot of effort to make sorghum short nights and long days very stressful many times and I ask myself why am I doing this but you know what what would I do in September and October if it wasn't harvest season if I was just taken out of that I don't even know that I would have a desire to live it is an excitement to go fire up that ball or start cooking that juice and see that fine syrup run off at the finish in and going into those containers it and people come by and tasting it and liking it it is something from the past that I'm keeping the life y'all like a sample of it would you have you ever had sorghum no all right we're going we're going to give everybody a little taste of it here today that's good isn't it Wow wait think you like that is not just me and my wife making muddy prawn sarvam it is a family effort if it was not for the family we would not survive at this even as a boy I dreamed of building equipment to make sorghum producing easier and because of that I guess it just gave me a deep inner connection to it it's in my blood yes it is in my blood there's lots of crops that I could raise but there is something about the sorghum making operation that we have setup the satisfaction that it brings to the customer is what drives me to do it I get out in the world I have vehicles I get to see a lot and I guess I feel like there's nothing else for me I don't look I don't wonder this is my calling I'm gonna do it till I die you

Channel: Eater

Views: 1,417,838

Rating: 4.9226165 out of 5

Keywords: vox media, eater, food, review, news, food porn, muddy pond, general store, southern food alliance, sorghum, Syrup (Food), Mennonite, Documentary (TV Genre)

Id: m-uoExhzL-g

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/stillwtnforbmrecords]

"It's just like sex, it's all good, some are just better than others". Never expected to hear that from a mennonite.

[u/FoodFarmer]

That man is at peace with his existence. Refreshing.

[u/L4NGOS]

Has anyone tried sorghum syrup? What does it taste like?

[u/JoshfromNazareth]

Sorghum and biscuits all day son

[u/Dark51d3]

"It's just like sex. It's all good and some is better than others."

Man, I like this guy.

[u/Tylensus]

That was a short 9 minutes. That kind of passion is one of the most admirable qualities we humans can have.

[u/Yugiah]

I can hardly believe how passionate this guy is.

[u/mattfuckingwaters]

Excellent post. Thank you.

[u/abraxsis]

My family makes an annual trip to the Mennonite area near Liberty, KY. The first stop is always Oberholzer's Sorghum. It isn't a big tourist spot like the one in the video, just a couple guys and horses crushing/making sorghum all day long. When we first started going there 12-15 years ago they were using woodfired boiling trays and horses to crush the cane. The men always laugh at me, the Englisher, who always brings a knife to peel and chew the fresh cane just like my grandpa showed me.

Modernization has crept in over the years, the smell of burning hardwood no longer mingles with the sweet fog of boiling sorghum. But even still, there is something about standing in a cold barn on a sunny Fall day, eating warm sorghum, that just makes the world an okay place, if only for a short respite.