DIY syrup from trees (not just maples)
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- Опубликовано: 30 янв 2022
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Tips for backyard syrup production from the University of New Hampshire: extension.unh.edu/sites/defau...
Tony Ragusea’s tree channel: / drtonyragusea 
Хобби
Shameless video for the sole purpose of seeing how many times Adam could say "tap that" in a RUclips video. Quality content.
I’m glad I finally found someone in the comments who also noticed that.
@@sosexyimsexy134 Jesus Christ are y'all summoned by sexual euphemisms?
@@enderman_666 Nah they're bots, it's useless to interact with them.
Yup :-)
He must have had a bet - how many times could he say “tap that”.
Tony moving like a npc and pointing to tree like its some kind of sidequest is the funniest shit
when the npc is waiting for you to press A and continue the conversation
npcs in the replies
@Tina Bulea who asked
Right? LOL
"Hey! You over there. Come make some syrup" (Y/N)
To make syrup, he became Adam Reducea
Step one: become Adam Reducea
Step two: Tap that shit
Slam dunk
As a Russian, and here birch sap is kind of a niche staple, I can confirm, real birch sap collected from a tree is delicious. Quite a hassle to tap, but I did it a couple times as a kid together with my family, and it was really good. Much better than the storebought variety I've seen in shops
As far as I remember we didn't tap trees until late February though haha. Talk about cold climate!
Deadly though to dogs and cats.
are trees are already budding in February in middle-America I was wondering if it is too late .. maybe i will tap them in January next year...
Can be used to make Birch Beer, which is my favorite soda.
The footage of Tony just standing next to the tree, waving and gesturing, was amazing. That's the kind of content I didn't know I needed
Him pointing at the tree being perfectly timed up with Adam narrating "and Tony *tapped* that!" left me in a state of delirium
Adam definitely said, "Just point and gesture a bunch, we'll take what we need" then, "lmao leave it all in."
@@rmschad5234 We would all do that to our brother if we had the chance
Idk why, it was so satisfying to watch lol. Someone else commented he looks like an npc with a side quest and that's so damn accurate
Standing next to a big ass tree. Can you believe he tapped that?
You kind of glossed over birch syrup, but I have made it and can confirm it is a thing. It's true that the sap is much more dilute than maple sap. Sugar maple sap is usually around 2% sugar and makes 1 part syrup from 40 parts sap. Even maple sap pretty much tastes like water. Birch sap can be even less than 0.5% sugar. It took me 280 gallons of sap to make 1.4 gallons of syrup, which I got from 32 trees in about 10 days. HOWEVER, birch sap flows a hell of a lot faster than maple, so the yield per tree isn't as bad as you'd think, especially since you can tap smaller and slightly younger trees than with maple. Reverse osmosis to concentrate the sap before boiling is absolutely worth it to remove most of the water.
Birch syrup is nothing like maple. It's darker, and sweet but also slightly acidic with strong notes of molasses. However, it's much more complex, and less offensive (and WAY more expensive) than molasses. It's great as a replacement for molasses or even balsamic reduction in recipes. I make a mean barbecue sauce with it. I've also heard of people using it in cocktails, but it's not great on pancakes.
I was just eating waffles with birch syrup when I opened this video. I think it's great on waffles personally, but I didn't make it myself. It's from a small company in Iceland.
Birch syrup is quite common in Finland
Mahla gäng
@@kasnu Sibelius-lukion parhaat 👌
Hetkinen mitä vittua
You can also tap Date palm trees and also coconut and toddy palm trees in winter, its great. Its how people in bengal make liquid jaggery syrup. The temperatures are also wayy above freezing yet they yield a lotta sap which can also be made into wine.
I don’t live where it’s cold enough to do this but I’ve been able to make a delicious low glycemic syrup from a plant called Yacon. It’s a tropical plant that has many edible parts. The syrup comes from the slightly sweet very watery tubers that grow underground. They taste kind of like jicama but a bit sweeter. I juice the tubers and boil the juice to make the syrup. It’s dark brown and thick and has a somewhat molasses-like flavor. The plant grows as tall as a small tree and the tubers can be eaten raw and cooked. The leaves can be used as tea and the roots as medicine. Oh and the fiberous stuff left over from juicing the tubers can be dried and used as flour so no waste from this plant. I would love to try tapping a tree for syrup. It’s very satisfying to make some of your own sweeteners.
Thats awesome, its always cool doing things yourself.
We do this thing in Bangladesh with date trees. And it's called 'khejurer gur' translation: date molasses. It's really sweet and delicious. We use it to make pithas or steamy rice cakes. Really good. You should do a episode on Bengali cuisine, it's simple yet hard and it has not been tampered with as much as North Indian cuisine. Love your informative videos. Keep it up👍
sounds delicious
Can you recommend any English language Bengali cooking RUclips channels?
How do you pronounce “khejurer gur”
@@fraserpeel4027 bong eats. Their channel is great.
From a date tree? Yeah I can see that turning out fucking amazing. Dryed out dates have a amazing taste, follows that the syrup of the tree would taste great as well.
Growing up in Michigan, our school teachers seemed to think we needed to learn how maple syrup was made. Like, every year. Three hours on the bus, 45 minutes at the farm, three hours back. I felt like an expert by the fifth grade.
You were actually being used as child labor
Didn't do that at my school, but as someone born and raised in Michigan, that definitely seems like a Michigan school thing to do.
I literally once took over the trip as a child. Apparently zi had it down enough to take over, and the guide was very annoyed.
We tapped a few trees my first day of 3rd grade, love watching these vids for nostalgia!
in vt our elementary school has a tap house haha
Whats funny is as soon as you mentioned Oak syrup containing too much tanins, thd first thing I thought was "I wonder what a little bit mixed in with maple syrup tastes like"... And then you immediately answered that, lol.
4:14, I definitely see the resemblance in your brother, Adam
Here in Sweden, there's a whole lotta birch tapping going on in the spring. I've tapped a couple of birches myself to make birch mead but I know that some people make birch syrup too. It is pretty low on sugar though. In our neighbouring country, Finland, there is an old tradition to tap birches and drink the sap straight as a way to get a mineral (and vitamine?) Boost after the cold, dark winter. They say that they're going into the woods to drink the marrow back into their bones.
If I recall correctly, Birch sap has a bunch of vitamin C and this tradition in the spring might have arisen as a scurvy remedy
Finn here, I do drink birch sap as it is every spring. I also always plug the hole in the tree when I'm done tapping so the tree won't "bleed" dry.
Lol you're making us Finns sound a bit crazy
@@ristovirtaharju5030 Miten nii?
We also used to steal the bark off of birch trees to make shoes.
Tried this with the turpentine tree out in my backyard, the results were literally to die for!
Turps is just the same thing but out of pine trees, isn't it?
@@alicewyan Boiled and fractionated to extract specific alkanes.
@@2993LP wait so you can tap pines?!
@@redowooga6475 They typically slash 'em like a rubber tree to avoid clogging.
@@2993LP wait what?! Tell me more, I wanna tap my pine tree too
LOVE all your vast knowledge in each video. Love the no nonsense way you teach us all this interesting stuff. Great delivery and so much fun thank you
My grandfather once said that they did so on birch trees in Sweden (where I live) and I thought he was full of BS, but then I read that it was true, I never tested it and it been hard for me to do so in a good way, but now I have a bit of land (rented) where I am allowed to do what I want with the trees there, so this video gave me the perfect idea. Thank you, and you may have saved 4 birch trees :-)
By the way, tell your brother to build a large pot around a tree to make worlds largest bonsai tree, then sell it in very small bottles as worlds first "Bonsai syrup"; this may be very bad marketing when it is as best, but a good joke too.
Birch syrup is delicious but very hard to get here in the US.
I feel like Adam just wanted to make a video where he could repeatedly say, "Tap that," in reference to non-humans
Meanwhile the bots scouring the site will think that you are referencing humans.
@@oscarcacnio8418 hey leave the bots alone buddy, they are just doing there job friend how would you like it if someone was saying snide things when you are just working friend ? The best way to get the understanding is to put yourself in their shoes guy, I totally understand if you have any initial dislike towards them after what's gone on with COVID and stuff buddy but you gotta learn to chill friend.
@@Professor-Scientist no I hate them too. RUclips is not the place for this kind of content. Also they’re bots not humans they don’t have feelings and don’t care what we comment about
@@Professor-Scientist The bots are spreading lowbrow degeneracy
In Latvia, Spring is birch tapping season and loads of people, it specially in the countryside, do it. Birch sap is slightly sweet and earthy tasting. It can also be bottled for later or let to sour up becoming a lightly alchocolic carbonated drink with a strong, sour taste.
Came here to second this! While as an American I never acquired the taste for bērzu sula, except for after a hard day of working on the farm, I had a lot of Latvian friends who loved it - including a guy who filled up a whole two liter coke bottle with the stuff! I've heard lemon peel is the best to ferment it with, which sounds more refreshing than the raisin brew I got in old whiskey bottles
It's amazing to see such international comments about tree syrup.🇱🇻
Drinking Birch sap in the spring is a spring tradition for me :-)
Sounds good I bet it would be a great sweetener for Sugar beets with apple cider vinegar
Love your country from another post ussr state
I love how straight and concise this guy is. Pretty thorough, I could have him teach me anything lol.
As always my kind sir, top notch informational content, I am never going to get bored with your content. How you produce so much top quality and informative media at such a rate is inspirational. Keep it up sir
My grandfather taught me how to make maple toffee (basically maple caramel made from further reducing the syrup) and he warned me not to stir it so as not to crystallize the sugar. Stirring it actually yields a different product called maple butter (the name is not quite right, in my opinion, but tradition, eh?). Maybe that's why yours got a bit grainy (even though you did dilute it with water)... or maybe it has nothing to do with that and it is actually the minerals!
sounds a bit like fudge
thats actually... correct. You can check that when making a caramel with white sugar. If you swirl the pan to make sugar just melt and mix by motion, it wont crystalize (i cant say at all, but def. not as much as when you stir it. Its just about making the "crystalization seeds"
Thanks for that info. Food science is so amazing. I have no clue what I'm doing and bits like this teaches me every little thing _is_ important.
Somebody mentioned tapping date trees (also called date palms) already. I just wanted to add, in addition to making syrup from date trees, you can directly drink the sap itself, provided you drink very early in the morning before it spoils. The sap is sweet and has a strong "tree-like" flavour, it's delicious! Another important point is that you have to cover the container carefully so that bats don't get access to it. Bats carry a lot of diseases and in the recent years there has been several Nipah virus outbreaks in Bangladesh, an infection with fatality rate of 50%.
be careful of the hickory bats
I remember when Nipah was the talk of the town here years back, really scary disease
In India people tap palms to drink the sap soon but also they leave it to ferment for a somewhat alcoholic drink
TIL you can tap the sap from date palms, and even straight up drink its syrup... as if dates weren't tasty enough already, knowing the tree they come from has more edible stuff in 'em makes me appreciate them even more.
"Bats carry a lot of diseases"
I would have never guessed 🙄
I learned this when I tapped the maple tree in my yard. It wasn't a sugar maple which taught me that, like he says, most deciduous trees can do this but it also was first hand experience at how much more work it is the extract the lower sugar content from them. Days of boiling pots and steam filling the house to turn buckets into cups, and we stopped when it was still thin.
Everything from 4:56 to 5:25 just felt like so many innuendos.
This is impressive.
“Getting that juice is the whole point of being a tree” I knew being a tree would pay off someday.
For tapping birch: it’s not best to tap during winter from my experience, spring is usually better (this is in the west of scotland, mileage may vary)
how about winters where its like -10 degrees average
Same thing here in Lithuania, though I don't know anyone who makes syrup from it. Plenty of people tap it and drink it like a natural soft-drink, though.
Making syrup from birch sap is something traditionally made in Sweden. Its more common to just straight drink it but syrup or fermented sap (alcoholic drinks) are not unheard of. I would like to try both of those things
@@HolyPineCone Birch sap wine is a thing in the UK, tapped in the first two weeks of March.
Birch sap is best harvested in spring at the start of growing season, just before any of leaf buds open. It isn't that great for making syrup as it has only around 1% sugar content so you need a lot to make a small amount of syrup.
Never even thought of tapping our black walnut trees. So excited to try this next year! Thank you.
I love the video and the way you present it 🤣
Thank you! Love from Switzerland
Last week I was struck by a random impulse to eat an icicle off of a maple tree, and I was stunned at how distinctly (albeit very slightly) sweet the ice was! Making homemade syrup has been on my mind since then and I'm glad I got my answer so quickly!
This is such a sweet comment, so the replies are kinda funny
Ah, yes, well, who _hasn't_ been struck by a random impulse to eat an icicle off of a maple tree?
If anyone is confused as fuck, lol, @ 9:14 the joke “We are Borg” is a reference to Star Trek TNG. The “Borg” are weirdo cybernetic lifeforms with all kinds of tubes and shit running all over the place. LOL, I love this fucking channel.
Tony standing and gesturing repeatedly while filling space for VO really got me. Good work.
1:38
"Where native peoples first learned how to tap that..." 😏
increasingly convinced that Adam made this video so that he could fit “tap that” in the script as many times as possible. respect.
EDIT: I really, really feel for the poor plant biologist who found out that they had to learn fluid mechanics to explain why tapping trees is optimal at certain temperatures.
I think it is more related to biology than to fluid dynamics.
Temperature, relative humidity, life history and biorythm of the tree all influence its transport systems in much more varying ways than the comparatively straight forward way fluids move through vessels.
It's both. But I'm willing to bet ancient people knew that the warmth in the morning after a cold night would release more sap through experimentation and trial. That and the similarity of anything else changing or shifting when going from cold to hot.
The ChemE in me thanks you for the edit 😂
@@tylerhough9124 haha! former chemE major here. I like to joke that I switched to Materials Sci because I would never have to think about fluids ever again lmao
Cries in Navier-Stokes
Then if you wanna go full Canada (Quebec, specifically) you can do a thing called "la tire" where you pour some boiling syrup over snow and it makes a kind of chewy taffy-like thing. It's traditional at a Quebecquois festival called "carnavale," and growing up in a Canadian French-immersion school we'd make it every year. Great stuff!
Then Adam could go down the “trou de lievre “ rabbit hole
Most sugar bush operation will use refractometer to verify sugar content, 56 % for syrup.
Then as he did you keep boiling and add air to the mix . It will give you your syrup cream then syrup butter to finish with your sugar loaf (much easier to cut /scrap when air bubbles are in suspension)
It is such a fun activity to do with the family
I've always been told "don't eat snow, is not clean".
So do they use homemade snow for this, if so, how to make snow?
@@ienfrg I guess it depends, but every time I've had it we've just used snow off the ground. I guess the cleanliness of snow depends where you are, and where you get it from. Canada doesn't generally have acid rain or anything similar, and of course we'd always grab the cleanest-looking snow from a pretty untouched area. Avoid yellow snow. There are some risks with using real snow, I guess, but we never had any issues. If you're really concerned about it, use your own snow for sure.
Snow is fine
Don’t over think it !
A benchmark for a real “cabane à sucre” is ; popsicles sticks stored in a old tobacco tins, them where the days .
That’s it , “œufs dans le sirop “ for lunch tomorrow , just say :
Coline de bonne bines
You will be served 2 eggs and some pudding chômeur made with maple syrup,virtually , of course.
You guys know about “pole syrup “?
Si c’est pas vrai, que diable m’emporte
@@ienfrg No no, it's don't eat the _yellow_ snow:
ruclips.net/video/QBpJgL8Aa5o/видео.html
This is awesome! Plus subscribed to Tony’s channel because bonsai trees are cool.
By far one of the most fascinating videos I have ever seen
"Tapping" and "tap that" are about to end up in a bunch of YTPs.
Callence gaming is probably having a field day with this.
I want "Where native peoples learned to tap that" on a T-shirt
I was thinking the same thing lol
4:56
"So I felt confident to tap that."
*points at tree*
-Adam Ragusea 2022
Adam shows that tree some lovin.
I'm mildly shocked there wasn't a "tap that ash" joke, and I'm honestly impressed with Adam's self control 🤣
@@acctsys proof he's a tree lover hahahah
@@ccriztoff it's a sexual innuendo. Something tells me your not good with the ladies and jokes. 🤣😂🤣😂
AMAZING ad placement! Very smooth transition. Thanks for a great video!
Those other holes in the tree are from yellow-bellied sapsuckers which are woodpeckers that drill wells for sap! Only here in the winter tho in NC and TN.
I've read (in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer) that to reduce the amount of boiling you have to do, you can leave your sap (covered) in a place where it'll freeze overnight, and then pull the ice off the top of the bucket. That ice will be water, and the remaining sap beneath will be more concentrated and will take less fuel to reduce to syrup.
While I am not a tree scientist or anything, I would be skeptical of this working based on the fact that popsicles exist. It is fairly simple to freeze a water/sugar solution so I would think that if got a gallon sized container of raw sap it would just all freeze if it was cold enough.
I'm not an expert either, and I'm sure sugar concentration and temperature matter. I just remembered this from when I read Braiding Sweetgrass (which I highly recommend, especially if you're in North America!)
@@Paxtez I think it’d make sense for more concentrated syrup to be at the bottom, but haven’t tried it either.
Sap freeze distillation?
@@Paxtez It does all freeze, but it separates into water and concentrated syrup/sap. As qwrites mentioned, it is the traditional indigenous way of making maple syrup.
I've had syrup from a silver maple before, I can verify that it's certainly possible but nowhere near as tasty as syrup from a sugar maple. It was not as sweet and had some brighter, more bitter, and a bit astringent undertones.
@remmi this is really good insight to deciduous tree syrups
I know a little about making maple syrup and I've never heard anyone say that silver maples make inferior syrup. They have slightly weaker sap than sugar maples so it takes more trees to make the same amount of syrup. If you got bitter syrup, it's probably because it was made with rancid sap, or late season (buddy) sap. These can ruin syrup quality no matter which variety of maple you use.
@@iankrasnow5383 Interesting. In that case I'm guessing it was harvested late in the season since it wasn't a rancid taste
@@iankrasnow5383 Can confirm 👍
Nothing is as tasty as maple
I don't know how much of the writing of these types of videos is written off the cuff, but I'm just so surprised and happy with the quality of writing on this channel.
I'd recommend stainless steel drinking straws. Cheap, easy to clean and depending on which end you stick in the tree you can control where it drips. Use a gallon juice container with a plastic hoop handle hung from a screw in hook for hanging tools.
5:04 Definitely needed to examine those nuts before tapping that thing
Great video! I have 36 acres in western NC, very close to the TN border, and it has an abundance of hickory, maple, walnut, and other hardwood trees (including sourwood, which my beekeeping neighbors are very grateful for). I can’t wait to “tap” into this resource and try the different flavors of syrup! Thank you Adam!
adam you killed it with the ad placement dude
Adam is really not scared of memers using "I felt confident to tap that" as a template.
Hell, he's inviting it! Man knows what he's doing
I don't know how he kept a straight face
He felt confident to tap that after examining its nuts. Gold.
"I felt confident to tap that"
13 year old me started snickering.
I love how you went through the same process I discovered for tapping my norweigan maple in my front yard
11:40 been to quite a few sugar shacks in my time (the sugar bush is the trees, shack is the boiling area) and it's actually easier to do on a fire than stove. Fire lets you use cauldrons and large pots since you can heat the sides, a stove only heats the bottom. The largest I've seen was probably the size of a medium hottub, 15x15 feet, maybe 8 feet deep? We like syrup ok 🇨🇦
Well now I regret having the only hickory tree in my backyard cut down.
You don't even tap hickory trees you make a 'tea' from roasted pieces of the bark and boil it down with sugar.
So basically go to a park, peel some pieces of bark, make sure you only take the most loose and outer pieces so you don't harm the tree, scrub and clean them, toast them in the oven or with a torch, boil toasted bark in water until it's dark, mix with sugar, boil, fin
Don't even need your own tree
WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!? the nuts are amazing too!
@@ga1actic_muffin pretty amazing wood too
internet consensus, you fucked up
did you at least make drumsticks out of it?
“First learned to tap that” is a gift to and “tapped that and lived to tell the tale” are gifts to YTPers
I have to say that this channel has become one my favorite ones. I've never been too much into cooking, but maybe that's because I haven't seen the "science" side of it too much.
This video is so good for so many reasons
There’s winery up here in Northern Michigan that makes wine from maple syrup called Maple Moon, and the stuff they make is really delicious and interesting. Maybe you could make hickory wine, too?
We make pine tree syrup here in Bulgaria, also something which is pretty close to honey (but is not exactly honey). We use the Pine needles and the pinecones from the tree, tastes quite awesome.
Greetings from Romania! Is it called "pine syrup" and used as cough medicine by any chance? If so we have the same thing here.
I use pine needles when I brew mead. No cultural thing, I just figured it would be tasty. And it is! Tea, or at least the steam from boiling pine needles are supposed to be good for respiratory issues.
@@silvanapopa same thing in serbia!!
@@HolyPineCone with a name like that, I believe you!
That's interesting, especially considering how heavily Adam emphasized not using coniferous trees
we have a massive wood burner that sits under a large pan, think 4x8 feet and it runs in channels. It's a lot of fun working on the syrup come spring.
As I learned from the Forager Chef, you can also make fermented syrups with pine cones, called mugolio, as well as unripe (green) black walnuts. But it's BYOSugar.
I live in Vermont and we usually get consistent temperatures for sap production mid feb through as late as early April. Sugar maple is so abundant that some farms and producers run sapline throughout the forest, all gravity fed with a sugar house at the base of a hill. VT is the worlds largest maple syrup producer outside of canada.
I love how a few months ago, RUclips kept recommending me your vinegar wing video and I kept ignoring it. After finally watching it, naturally, I binge watched a ton of your other videos. Fast forward to today, I love that this has become one of my favorite channels and I not only learn cooking, but also foraging. Thanks, Adam! Keep it up and stay safe and healthy.
RUclips algorithm knows you better than you know yourself
I actually watched that vinegar video months ago, and youtube still recommends that video to me
In post soviet eastern Europe we drink birch "juice" as we call it. An awesome beverage, often mixed with lemon, sugar and fresh mint. Great summer refreshment, especially in hot southern areas.
So eastern European Mint Birch Lemonade?
@@jetseekers you could say so. It is not that common, tho. One cant buy it in the supermarket. more of a thing of rural and small town folk.
@@gliverwise10 Idk where you're from, but I regularly see birth sap in supermarkets in Kyiv though, it's factory-made, of course, but has some real sap in the ingredients
We have a few huge Silver Maples on our property, and for years they were ignored, until one day the idea to tap them went on like a lightbulb. Now we make our own syrup, and while it isn't the sweetest, it has a beautiful rich body and a light pecan flavor from the tannins. We make just enough to serve our needs each year, with a few bottles extra for family, and I think that's perfect
‘Damn did you see that deciduous tree in the park earlier’
‘Ohhhh yeah I’d tap that’
Probably worth mentioning that unless you have a vent hood for your range, you proooobably are gonna want to reduce the syrup outside, unless you want your kitchen walls to smell like tree syrup and be sticky FOREVER. There's a reason sugar shacks are a thing :)
i have never in my life heard of a sugar shack, but god do i want to know more.
Absolutely. Boil outside. Your entire house will get covered in sticky steam residue. Finish your syrup off inside on the stove when you have boiled it down quite a bit. As in start with 5 gallons of sap and boil it down to maybe a quart or two to bring inside. When I tapped my maple trees in my backyard, I had four taps in two trees. I could produce 1 gallon of syrup in a season and in a good year 5-1/2 quarts. My trees were actually about 25:1 of sap to syrup. Different maple varieties vary in sugar concentration.
when i went to maple sugaring (my summer camp also ran a maple sugaring ca,mp in winter/spring.) we foudn out that people sterilize the holes (and drill bits and the spigots) and also when done with the tap, the hole is usually plugged to keep bugs and fungi and etc out of it.
the maple sugar boiling down is done in big very shallow pans over a fire, and the building it was sugaring in had some "upstairs" areas like a sauna... it was neat. the pans reminded me of the big salt making pans i have seen in many videos also.
maple syrup is graded by color, incidentally.
I’ve seen people’s setups here in canada which tapped over 500 trees, all connected with tubing to their shack where they’d boil and bottle. Very impressive
We are proud of you for not making a “tap it with protection to avoid spreading diseases” comment
As always, thank you for spending your limited time on Earth by producing quality content that helps your subscribers gain more knowledge about health, food, cooking, and so much more. Keep up the great work, and I'm sad to see you leave Macon, but I can't blame you. There's literally nothing to do there (always hoped to see you by chance when I went through Macon every time I went to my farmhouse in Alma).
I miss when reply sections weren't filled filled with spamming bots....
@@businessisboomin7252 R.I.P good old youtube, and also frick youtube for ruining their own platform and not caring about the bot problem
I am Ukrainian and I remember growing up and drinking birch "juice" as a kid growing up. Its really good and indeed is refreshing drink. I can still find it in Slavic stores here in the US every now and then. Definitely recommend it to anyone. Its a very light flavor and its nothing crazy but it tastes good.
ooooh got a black walnut in my back yard, will definitely keep an eye on the weather, it's been freezing already so hopefully we start seeing it get a little warmer. Looks like a good activity to do with the kid
I love the tropics for the diversity of life in it, including many varieties of fruit-brearing plants, but syrup producing trees is one thing I envy from areas with temperate climates.
In south/south east asian countries they use often syrup from sugarpalms. In sri lanka they make even wine and liquor out of it.
@@toby7652 I know, but they don't taste the same.
7:46 Typical Saturday night
I have lived in a tropical country all my life, but your way of explaining made me watch the entire video. I will never reducea my ragusea video watching.
Thank you for the informative video. We also live in East Tennessee on 16 acres with a lot of Black Walnut and Hickory we’re going to try our hands at making our own syrup.
*This is why I squeeze my trees, not my lemons*
In Lithuania we ferment birch tree juice. We put some blackcurrant twigs (no berries) in our birch juice, close the lid and let it stay in a basement for some time.
In South and South East Asia we make syrup and jaggery from several types of palms. It's quite common and used for several desserts and candy. Palm syrup, jaggery and sugar tastes nuttier than cane derived versions.
As a fellow east TN native, I already have about four black walnuts nearby in mind. Handy having such a knowledgeable guy in my area!
Thanks. This will be the second of your recipes I've tried (hooray pizza bread). We have LOTS of hickory trees. We pick the nuts in the fall so we know which trees are hickories. Also, I'm delighted to have a possible good use for the bitternut trees. I want to find out if the bitterness in the bitternuts is in the sap, too. Right out my window I see a south facing shagbark hickory tree. It's a ridiculous amount of energy to make syrup but in February and March we're still paying to heat the house so it doesn't seem as wasteful to boil syrup as it does to can fruits and vegetables in the summer whilst also paying for air conditioning.
All cooking heat does eventually disperse throughout a room, and eventually house, but hopefully not as quickly to outside your house. In the winter.
Same for other energy sources.
My mom tried to make soft maple sap into syrup, in her own kitchen. All she succeeded at was steaming the wallpaper off kitchen walls!
@@joycebrewer4150 did you get more wallpaper?
@@thecookingcat5140 No, painted walls after that.
I'm no expert, but I have made maple syrup a few times. If you're collecting a small amount of sap, like what Adam did, reducing it down inside the house should be fine. But if you collect several gallons of sap or more I would highly recommend you do it outside. Alternatively you can start it outside, getting it reduced down very close to syrup, and finish it off inside on your stove/cooktop where temperature is a lot easier to control. As alluded to by Joyce Brewer above, you don't want to boil off that much water into your home (even if you have a good range hood.) If you did, peeling wallpaper would be the least of your worries... Imagine the potential amount of mold growing in your ceilings, subfloors, and walls with all that moisture? That 40:1 sap to syrup ratio Adam gave in the video is not an exaggeration. And, that's the ratio for sugar maples - a tree with sap that has very high levels of sugar content. If you're tapping some other kind of tree that ratio will be even higher on the sap end which means even more water to boil off.
i really like birch "water". The flavor is hard to describe since it has a unusual type of sweetness with a slight woody acidity. While here in Germany where i live not many people drink it, its more popular in the slavic countries and therefore is available in "russian" supermarkets. Im half ukranian so my mom showed it to me first
When I was a kid, I used to love peeling the young silver maple seeds in our yard and eating the drop of clear liquid that had formed inside the premature seed-bubble before the embryo developed. Sort of like maple syrup, but thinner and without the cooked-carmel flavor
For Americans:
They meant caramel they just spell it differently
While the date palm tree is useful for dates, people in eastern India use its sap to make jaggery, the granulated version of the sap. People in the southern state of Kerala ferment the sap of the coconut tree to make a slightly alcoholic beverage called Toddy, which is an everyday staple.
“I examined it’s nuts” SOMEONE CLIP THAT WITHOUT CONTEXT
Why I season my tree, not my soil.
I'm from northern Finland and we tap birches every year! The sap looks just like water but tastes very fresh and slightly sweet, it's the perfect drink
I never knew I needed Adam’s brother Tony making Bonsai trees into now
I've been trying to talk myself out of attempting to make my own tree syrup this season, and wow, the universe is really not helping in that regard, hahaha. This video is excellently timed.
Why are you trying to talk yourself out of it? 👀
Adam is slowly answering every food question I have ever had
Belarusian here. Birch tree “juice” is the most refreshing thing I have ever tried. The fresh one with a bit of sugar and citric acid is probably my favourite drink in summer.
Enjoyed the vid. You got a good sense of humor
At my grandparents farm here in Wisconsin we recently switched to using a reverse osmosis machine to get rid of most of the water, but we still finish it off over a wood fire to add a bit more smokey flavor. A couple years ago someone had to stay out in the shed overnight to tend to the fire.
I've seen an actual syrup operation in the backwoods of Wisconsin. Cool stuff. They had brought out a big propane heater and had a large stainless steel trough and processed it next to all the trapped trees. Great smells.
I've made both maple and birch syrup, the later being much more work but was happy with the results. As Adam said birch has a much lower Sugar content so instead of the 40 to 1 ratio of maple syrup I had to evaporate around 90 to 1. And I say evaporate rather than boil because birch saps sugar is fructose rather than sucrose and it will burn at 104 degrees so it needs to be kept below boiling in the later stages when it gets over 102 degrees. You need to use a refractometor to make sure the sugar content is high enough to be shelf stable.
I did not know I could also make syrup with the black a walnut tree near my garage! Nice video bud appreciate it
Adam’s videos are the best thing to watch during breaks at work.
Either it gets me hungry and exited for cooking dinner, or it’s some random, extremely interesting topic that picks at my adhd enough to distract me from whatever costumer service hell one emerges from.
"I felt confident enough to tap that" - Adam Ragusea
I live in central Alaska, so in non-boggy areas and the sunward facing sides of hills, Birch trees are the dominant tree species. Birch water is tasty. It has very mild sweet flavor. Birch syrup takes tons of boiling to produce, since the sugars are very diffuse in comparison with something like maple sap. The resulting syrup is strongly flavored, with a nice smoky taste. It is less good as a table syrup since it is strongly flavored, but good in crepes and other desserts, and in other cooking applications, like as a glaze.
So much innuendo bingo in this video, well done Adam.
"You also want to make sure that it's a pretty big, pretty mature tree." -Adam
Tap responsibly.