Wild Food Foraging- Yellow Birch Sap- The Taste of Spring!

hello fellow outsiders just walking in the bush really quietly today to see what I can see I don't think you guys can hear it but I can hear a turkey calling deeper into the bush that way so I'm just being really quiet to see if I can get in without being detected and this is turkey season right now so I'm probably going to see a few turkeys and if I'm lucky I might even see some coyotes trying to hunt them so I'd be a real treat but now is the time of year when the yellow birch sap is starting to flow and the el birch sap flows right after the maple sap is done flowing maple sap flows ideally when the day is about five degrees above zero and during the day and then during night minus five but I yellow birch trees the SAP flows best when the temperature is around fifty degrees Fahrenheit during the day and I think that equals to 16 degrees Celsius but anyways I'm just going to check some yellow birch trees here and see how the sap is flowing and if I can I would like to collect some yellow birch sap so here goes nothing so this is a yellow birch tree and it looks pretty scraggly that's I can tell it's yellow birch is because the bark peels and kind of tatters like this a white birch the bark is a lot whiter and it feels more in sheets and with a yellow birch when the Sun hits it just right there's kind of this golden sheen that comes off of the bark I don't know if you can see it on the camera here but it's got a bit of a yellowish goldish tinge to it that's how you know you've got a yellow birch so I'm just going to take the tip of my knife here and I'm going to tap it into the tree just a little bit and see if there's any SAP flowing and as you can see it's flowing pretty good so I'm going to see if I can start collecting some now so what I've gotten here is a hard wood branch that I'm going to carve into a bit of a Spile that I'm going to use to collect the yellow birch sap into a container I don't know if you can see it but some I've whittled this stick flat with my knife and in the very center you can see there's kind of a softer part of the wood here and so I'm going to make this into a Spile that I can use to tap the yellow SAP and so I'm just going to take the tip of my knife and just push out the softer wood from the center and that'll be a channel for the yellow SAP to flowing into the bottle that I have set up for it okay so I've got my Spile made up here I'm just going to make the initial entry into the BARC with my knife and then I'm going to tap the Spile into the hole there and let it start dripping okay this tree has a good drip so this will be a good one to put my smile into the intrusion that my knife makes into the birch is so minimal that it doesn't injure the tree not any more than a light scratch would hurt a person nowadays birch sap is being hailed as the new super drink that's because it's packed with vitamins minerals antioxidants electrolytes and natural sugars birch sap is said to boost the immune system lower cholesterol detoxify the body and it is even thought to have anti-aging properties the SAP also contains the chemical xylitol a naturally occurring sugar alcohol which the American Dental Association says helps fight tooth decay birch sap is marketed not only as a health drink but also as a beauty product in some parts of the world birch sap is so popular that I've heard it can sell for up to twenty dollars a liter but nature has Vaughn tap for free now this is the second drip that I've set up so between the two smiles that I have here I should have something to drink fairly quickly which I'm looking very much forward to yellow birch sap and well also sweet birch or black birch has oil of wintergreen right in the sap so if you chew on the twigs or or boil the twigs to make some tea which I've done before in previous episodes it'll have a slight hint of wintergreen flavor to it which is really Pleasant but anyways now that the second one is ready to go and I can leave both of them to drip for a while and I'll return soon it's been about two hours now and yeah so let's take a look okay so this one's still dripping a little bit but I've only collected a little bit of SAP in there so I'm just going to take this off the tree now and go on to the next one and see how much I've collected there so again I've only had these dripping for two hours and I have almost half a water bottle here and this tree was dripping a little slower obviously so less but still a little bit notice that this one here is a little more cloudy than the one off the tree that was dripping faster so I don't know if this sap is starting to the sugars are starting to break down already but I'll try them separately and see if there's a difference in flavor something that I forgot to mention earlier was that yellow birch sap flows for only two to three weeks so it's much shorter than the maple sap season because on the maple trees the SAP flows for I think it's around four to six weeks so much faster period so you have to get the the yellow birch trees when the time is right and I just so happened to get them in the right time definitely refreshing it has a slight yellow tinge to it but not much and it's actually quite cold too which is nice a lot of people assume that maple sap and yellow birch sap will have a really sweet and sticky kind of flavor to it but actually both saps are it tastes a lot like water because they haven't that they haven't been boiled down yet to where the sugar content is higher so with yellow birch sap you get maybe a hint of wintergreen flavor but not much the same thing with maple sap is you get just a hint of the maple flavor but it's hard to distinguish it does taste a lot like water but the fact of the matter is that this stuff is this stuff is really really refreshing and of course you can't deny all the health benefits that come with drinking this stuff so all in all really refreshing really healthy and this my friend is the taste of spring you

Channel: The Outsider

Views: 209,808

Keywords: sap, syrup, tree, maple, birch, yellow, spring, wild edibles, outsidefun1, outsider, sugar, bush, harvest

Id: n-ll6DYPvM4

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 05 2016