How To Turn Trees Into Sugar
One of the aspects of living off of the land without modern resources that had me worried was the difficulty in making sugar. Today sugar comes almost exclusively from sugar beets or sugar cane. If you don't have seed when the SHTF then you are out of luck! Or if you fail to secure seed from your crop you will soon be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.
Luckily I have discovered that you don't need to live in a certain climate to get sugar, save maybe for the desert. If you have any forest nearby then you can turn trees into sugar. The first step I will not cover here, which is how to tap trees for their sap. This sap is used to make syrup. I already covered it in a previous article. Here is the link!
Turning sap to syrup and then from syrup to sugar is really a very easy process. Granulated sugar made from tree sap is no different than the sugar you buy at the store. Granulated sugar made this way is called indian sugar, because Indians (aka native Americans) were the first to discover how to do this.
To make your Indian sugar we will start at the syrup stage. This stage is nothing more than sap that has been boiled down to the consistency of syrup. To continue the process you place your syrup in a pot and heat it until you get it boiling. Once it is boiling you heat it some more. You want to bring the temperature up to about 250F. You can adjust this temperature through trial and error. Your equipment and how much syrup you are trying to convert will cause variance in the optimal temperature. You don't need a thermometer either. You can rely completely on how long past boiling you let the pot remain on heat.
Once you believe the temperature has been reached you allow it to cool. You will need to start stirring the syrup as soon as practical. This is the hard part and where extra arms come in handy. What you are trying to do here is drive off all of the moisture. Not most of it, all of it!
You do not need to still 100% of the time, however, you will need to stir most of the time. As you stir it is good to let the thickened syrup settle and then resume stirring again.
You need to keep stirring until all moisture is removed. If your heating wasn't perfect you will need to apply more heat. The higher the heat the faster the water will evaporate and the less stirring you will need to do. You should strive to have the syrup still steaming hot even when free of water.
When the sugar stops emitting steam and is crumbly you are finished. It is better to err on stirring and heating to long rather than to short. If you fail to drive off all of the moisture you sugar will spoil and all that work will have been wasted. The sugar will not be fine and powdery like you get from the store. To reach that consistency you will need to grind and or sift the sugar down.
Before storing your sugar you should spread it out on a table and allow it to completely cool down. Granular sugar absorbs moisture out of the air so you will need to store your sugar in an airtight container. Sugar will not last long unless you store it in sealed containers.
Once your Indian sugar has cooled down you can seal and store it away.
Luckily I have discovered that you don't need to live in a certain climate to get sugar, save maybe for the desert. If you have any forest nearby then you can turn trees into sugar. The first step I will not cover here, which is how to tap trees for their sap. This sap is used to make syrup. I already covered it in a previous article. Here is the link!
To make your Indian sugar we will start at the syrup stage. This stage is nothing more than sap that has been boiled down to the consistency of syrup. To continue the process you place your syrup in a pot and heat it until you get it boiling. Once it is boiling you heat it some more. You want to bring the temperature up to about 250F. You can adjust this temperature through trial and error. Your equipment and how much syrup you are trying to convert will cause variance in the optimal temperature. You don't need a thermometer either. You can rely completely on how long past boiling you let the pot remain on heat.
You do not need to still 100% of the time, however, you will need to stir most of the time. As you stir it is good to let the thickened syrup settle and then resume stirring again.
You need to keep stirring until all moisture is removed. If your heating wasn't perfect you will need to apply more heat. The higher the heat the faster the water will evaporate and the less stirring you will need to do. You should strive to have the syrup still steaming hot even when free of water.
When the sugar stops emitting steam and is crumbly you are finished. It is better to err on stirring and heating to long rather than to short. If you fail to drive off all of the moisture you sugar will spoil and all that work will have been wasted. The sugar will not be fine and powdery like you get from the store. To reach that consistency you will need to grind and or sift the sugar down.
Before storing your sugar you should spread it out on a table and allow it to completely cool down. Granular sugar absorbs moisture out of the air so you will need to store your sugar in an airtight container. Sugar will not last long unless you store it in sealed containers.
Once your Indian sugar has cooled down you can seal and store it away.
