Now is the time of year that farmrs here in the NE tap sugar maple tress. it is fairly laborious-it takes about 30 gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. what about birch tres? they have a sap that contains sugar-does anyonemake birch syrup? I know beer was made from birch sap in colonial times-is birch beer still made?
I bought a small bottle of birch syrup years ago when I was in Alaska.
I still have most of it.
It is sweet, but it has an undoubted ‘tree-like’ flavor to it that I don’t find appealing. It tastes a little like birch beer (and that’s easy enough to find in a lot of grocery stores near me) but with woody overtones.
Birch syrup is less common than maple syrup becuase it requires 100 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. But it is available from producers in Alaska, among others.
I tried birch and spruce syrups while in Alaska in 2000. There’s a reason why maple is the popular one; the others are simply unpalatable.
If you’re condensing it by applying heat to drive off the water, it’s more prone to burning than maple sap, because of the different sugars (IIRC Maple is sucrose, birch is fructose)
What other tree saps are edible?
Palm sap is one that springs to mind (various different species) - harvesting it usually involves cutting down the tree and draining the trunk, I think.
In the UK and Northern Europe, there’s sycamore, but that’s a kind of maple, so perhaps it isn’t surprising.
I’m astonished, I tell you. Astonished!
The Larch.
(OK, not really).
I hear that poppy sap is pretty popular.
Yours is, ours isn’t. Our sycamore is what you guys usually call a plane tree. Don’t know if you can get syrup out of our sycamore, but I wouldn’t think so.
That’s interesting - I never knew that.
I’m sure you can - the only question is whether it will be edible/toxic/unpalatable.
Nearly any deciduous, broad-leafed tree that has clear sap could probably yield syrup - as they’ll pretty much all be pumping sugar-water up to their developing buds, but some of them might not be good or safe to eat (which I expect is what you really meant anyway).