Sweet Birch Iced Tea

Some folks have asked about this tea since our last post.  Here's how we make it. 

1. Materials:  We use loppers, half-gallon jars with tops (Mason jars), and a jelly bag. 
2. Gather:  We prefer sweet birch, also known as black birch, (Betula lenta) to yellow birch (Betula lutea), but both make a wintergreen tea.  The other birches are not worth gathering in our opinion.  I cut a 2-3 foot branch with loppers. 
3. Cut:  We use the loppers to cut the branch and all of its twigs into 7 inch lengths so that they fit easily into our jar.  Sometimes we give Yub-yub a butterknife and have her scrape at the bark of the larger twigs to reveal the green living tissue beneath it.  This, however, is mostly a babysitting tactic and is not necessary unless your three-year-old insists on being part of the process.  
4.  Steep:  The molecule that gives birch tea its most important flavor is volatile.  Practically speaking this means that you don't want it to get too hot.  If it does, you're tea does not taste as good.  We usually pour not-quite-boiled water over the twigs or let the water boil first and then let it cool a bit.  Then, we put the cover on the jar.  This may be an old wives' tale, but I think it helps improve the flavor.  The key with birch teas is to let them steep for a long time.  We steep for about 45 minutes.  Arthur Haines (one of New England's premeire botanists and author of Ancestral Plants) recommends even longer, 2-3 hours.  We've recently taken to putting our tea in the fridge afterward.  It's very refreshing on a hot day. 
5. Filter:  If you don't mind solids in your tea, it tastes fine straight up.  We, however, screw a jelly-bag over the jar to catch all the bits. 

Sweet Birch Tea (Betula lenta)

Our little one, who's real name is Eva, loves to make sweet birch tea (Betula lenta). It is a fantastic, real life project that keeps her busy when I am cooking, giving her a way to contribute to our meals.

As far as winter edibles go, this is one of our favorites. Warm, delicious, and so satisfying on a cold winter evening around the camp fire or over the reading of a good book.

Our woods have a plentiful supply of black birch trees (yellow birch also makes a similar brew), easy to correctly identify because of its clear wintergreen smell when its twigs are scratched. You can break up small twigs, fill a jar, cover with almost boiling water and wait until the tea reaches your desired flavor. Eva likes to take the twigs and shave them with a butter knife. She finds this activity deeply satisfying; she will shave twigs for upwards of 40 minutes!

So if you have little ones (or if you do not) introduce them to sweet birch tea--a wild food that is sure to please.

Birch Syrup--Finally Done

Ooga grew up on Aunt Jemima. For most of her childhood, she didn't put any syrup on her pancakes at all. Eating and cooking with syrup is something that she has grown into. So, today, when we finally tasted our birch syrup on a breakfast of French toast, Ooga wasn't sure if she liked the flavor or not. Maybe it was something she would have to grow into as well.

Earlier this week we finally took all the jars of 'mostly syrup' out of the fridge, combined them, and boiled them down. We used the spatula test to tell if the syrup was done since we didn't have a float to measure the specific gravity. We've never used this test before, and it seems we missed the mark a little. Our syrup, although sweet, is not as thick as a syrup should be.

Reviews: The syrup is very mild in flavor, much milder than maple syrup. It is also very mildly astringent--I know that sounds unappetizing, but it's not unpleasant at all. Ooga describes the flavor as woodsy. It reminds me of a flavor that I wouldn't expect to be sweet. But it's not as sweet-tasting as maple syrup is anyway. I enjoyed it smothering my breakfast, and we'll have no problem finishing it, but I feel we haven't quite perfected our birch sugaring yet. (No wintergreen flavor at all. Several friends had asked. I suspect that the molecules that give this flavor to the twigs and tea are too fragile to survive all that boiling intact.)

Both Laura and I give this one a 3--palatable.

Some advice for next time:

1. Boil one pot at a time.--At first we had just kept adding sap to one pot, constantly diluting the concentrated sap. This method seems to darken the syrup and impact the flavor somewhat.
   
2. Wait for real syrup.--We stopped too early, thinking that the sheets that we're supposed to see falling off the end of our spatula had come. This is going to be tricky to get just right. Boil too long and you've scalded the fruits of all your hard work.

Sugaring Birches: Part 1

This week I borrowed some buckets and an old hand drill from our friend, Ken, and set out to tap some birches. I tapped Betula lenta (Black Birch), but Peterson's says that all the birches have edible sap. Our friend, Tifin, said that she did not care for birch syrup when she tried it in Alaska where there is a dearth of maple trees. Apparently the wintergreen flavor of the twigs does not transfer to the syrup. My co-worker, Matt, and I speculated that the molecules that give the twigs that fresh flavor might be changed at high temperatures. Undeterred, I set out to experiment and learn what I could.

At first I thought that only two taps would not be enough, but Abe said that over the course of the season one can expect to get about one quart of maple syrup from each tap. That's 10 gallons of sap from each tap! Birch sap supposedly flows even more prodigiously. After thinking about it that way, two taps seemed just fine.

I found two goodly sized trees and tapped away only to find that the next day there was . . . nothing. The buckets were dry.