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  • From: SJC <indexer AT localnet.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] was sorghum, now sweeteners
  • Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:40:16 -0400

Don Bowen wrote:
The processes for making cane sugar is very similar to Sorghum Molasses
except you go beyond the molasses stage. You could make sugar from Sorghum
molasses. Similar process for beet sugar.

Let's see:
Honey. Easy to get, just take the caps off the comb and drain.
Maple Syrup. Collect sap in the spring then boil off the water.
Other trees can also yield a sweet sap.
Sorghum Molasses. Grow Sorghum, cut the whole stalk, squeeze out the
juices, boil off the water.
Cane sugar. Same as Sorghum except the molasses is taken a few more steps.
Beet sugar. Grow sugar beets, harvest roots, mash, squeeze, boil off water,
continue as cane sugar.

Others?
Several tree saps are good, process same as maple. Here we tap birches (my favorite, as I'm not that fond of maple syrup, plus that's a cash crop around here, better to sell that one). When I was still in IN we used hickory, another favorite, but hickories are few and far between here, not a good resource. Some folks use butternut or black walnut, also not favorites of mine, but a lot of folks like it. I'd not do anything to jeopardize a black walnut unless for some reason that tree not good for the wood, anyhow). Basically, I'd say if you have an abundance of some sort of tree, try a run one spring and see how it goes. Warning: it takes a LOT of sap to get syrup (maple 40 gal to get a gal of grade A syrup, birch almost double that, others vary a lot, and they all will vary some year-to-year). Warning #2: Do not try to boil down sap in the house unless you are doing a tiny trial run. You will be scrubbing sticky off walls, chair rungs, light fixtures, window frames, etc, for a year if you make a batch in the house!

Not a sweetening syrup per se, but when I was a kid my uncle always boiled down some cherry sap to syrup stage to be used as a cough syrup. And if that didn't cure ya, ya got the pine sap treatment, so we always tried hard to stop with the cherry.....

The other homestead-produced sweetener I use is boiled down fruit juices. I usually steam fruits for the juice before going any farther, that juice I sometimes can for using as juice, but I always boil some down to use as syrup. The berries make especially good pancake syrups. Cherry and apple I usually boil down quite a bit of the juice for syrup. I don't necessarily boil it all the way down until it's any particular density, instead I boil it down until it's somewhere near right and can it. Then when I go to use it, if it's not sweet enough, I either adjust recipe to fit it or boil it down a bit more. This year I put back 26 quarts and 14 pints of finished apple syrup, and that will pretty much hold me for a year, I hope! Sweet, soft apples that aren't good for much else are good for this use, then feed pulp to hogs/goats/whatever. Mostly I use the apple syrup for making cookies.....I'm part of a group that meets every military transport plane in and out of Bangor International Airport and provides the guys/gals with cookies, drinks, thanks, and good wishes, so seem to be baking more cookies now than I ever did when I had kids at home!

SusanJane, in Maine




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