Making Sugar Cane Syrup

[walkin2e]

When I was a child growing up in the 50's and 60's, one of my uncles had an annual "cane grinding". The smell of cooking sugar cane juice was one I will never forget. There would be dozens of people, all ages, at this event, and we would get to eat fresh ground sausage, homemade biscuits and pancakes, and of course, fresh cane syrup. Us kids would get to ride the mule who pulled the pole around in circles...now a tractor is used.

One of my uncle's sons, has revived this tradition, and a few weeks ago, he made a fresh batch of syrup. I'm fixin' to fry some good hickory smoked bacon, make some french toast, and pour on the cane syrup. I didn't get to go to the event (I was picking up pecans) but one of my brother-in-law's brought me a quart bottle, which I promptly dropped and busted. He gave me another bottle, and it was good.

I'm makin' it here in the country outside this little ole town of Blackshear in south Georgia.

walkin2e

 

[Bird]

That sounds like a fun tradition, well worth reviving.

 

[jinman]

Man-o-man! That sure brings back some memories. Back in the late 50s and early 60s, I also had an uncle who grew sugar cane and made his own syrup. When he started growing the cane, he didn't have a mill or cooker and had to haul his cane by truck to east Texas to get it milled and cooked off. It didn't take him long to figure out that he needed to set up his own mill and process the cane onsite.

About 1959, he bought an Allis-Chalmers tractor with a big belt drive hub on the side. He also found a cane mill he could drive with a belt. We built a platform for the mill about 4' off the ground so he could stack the cane around it and one person on the ground could keep the platform supplied with cane while someone on the platform fed cane into the mill. The juice dropped down to a sump and drained into big 55 gallon barrels as holding tanks. The barrels had a feed pipe going to the cooker with a valve to adjust for a slow, but constant feed.

The cooker was a galvanized pan with zig-zag sections made so the juice would cook as it moved from the front of the pan to the rear. With the correct temperature and feed, cooked syrup flowed out the far end of the cooker at a constant rate. One person filled sterilized quart and pint jars with the syrup as it flowed out.

To build the cooker, we built a chimney with two rows (walls) of brick out in front for 12 feet and maybe 18" high. Between the brick walls we put white sugar sand that had been dug out of a neighbor's pond. The white sand was a perfect heat reflector. We set the cooker pan down on the brick walls, creating a void below it for the burner. The burner ran off of natural gas we plumbed in from my uncle's house about 150' feet away.

The perfect setup for the mill was to have two people feeding cane, one person running the cooker, and one person with a skimmer cleaning the foam off the top of the syrup as it cooks. If things went smoothly, the skimmer could also fll the jars.

I'll never forget how that green sweet liquid smelled and tasted. I used to tell my friends to close their eyes until they got used to it. Many people just could not stand the way the raw juice looked. As it weaved its way down the cooker, the skimmings rose to the top and the juice turned from green to a clear amber to dark amber as it cooked to perfection. My uncle listened to the bubbles popping to tell him when the juice was syrup and ready to bottle.

When I saw the title of this thread, those smells and tastes just popped back into my head. I'll never forget the strong sweet taste of that sugar cane syrup and my uncle telling customers, "You won't have to chase this syrup around your plate with your biscuit like that store-bought stuff." He was right.

 

[RobertN]

We were in Costa Rica a year ago. Went to an Eco farm for a tour. The owner, grew sugar cane. But, he fermented some of it, for a really nice liquor.

 

[JRobyn]

Sorta like this?

My BIL has done the annual "Sorghum Festival and Old-Timer's Day" every year in October. That's him in the straw hat and zztop beard in the cookhouse. He missed last year due to the crappy economy and poor cane crop.

- Jay

 

[walkin2e]

Sorta like this?

My BIL has done the annual "Sorghum Festival and Old-Timer's Day" every year in October. That's him in the straw hat and zztop beard in the cookhouse. He missed last year due to the crappy economy and poor cane crop.

- Jay

Now that paints a purty picture!

That fresh cane juice had two drawbacks..it would attract yellow jackets, and if you drank too much, you had to find an outhouse mighty fast.

walkin2e

 

[JRobyn]

Here's the cookhouse showing the "serpentine" cookpan. He had some guys fab his up out of stainless!

 

[JRobyn]

Now that paints a purty picture!

That fresh cane juice had two drawbacks..it would attract yellow jackets, and if you drank too much, you had to find an outhouse mighty fast.

walkin2e

You got that right!!

And as if the juice didn't draw enough, all the food (desserts especially) that everyone brought attracted all the more! He'd always have a group of guys from his plant come up and stay up all night the night before cooking the whole hog, fresh-fried chitlins, and 20 gallon iron pots of greens and beans! Yum.

- Jay

 

[bearcat73]

That sounds like a fun tradition, well worth reviving.

Absolutely!!! Sounds like a lot of fun that the children today shouldn't have to miss out on!


I've never tried cane syrup, but I bet it'd be good on fried mush.

 

[JohnDeere4300]

There is a 92 year old man about two miles from my house that does it every year,(I HOPE THIS YEAR) when he starts we all try and help him out, people come from different counties to watch.

He's the only one around that still does it, me and my wife have talked about getting in to it, here is a place where you can buy different kinds of Sorghum seeds.


*Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds________www.Rareseeds.com*

 

[redlevel]

We were in Costa Rica a year ago. Went to an Eco farm for a tour. The owner, grew sugar cane. But, he fermented some of it, for a really nice liquor.

There were several farmers in my county who made syrup every year. Some of them would leave the "skimmings" in the syrup kettle after the syrup making process. It would ferment, and some of the help who lived on or near the farm would stay drunk on it for weeks. You would see some of them in town on Saturday afternoon, looking absolutely terrible. That stuff was supposed to cause a terrible hangover.

 

[woodchuckie]

I didn't get to see it made until I was 30 years old in 1980. The cooker foundation was made out of rock found in the area. The heat was generated by 100% pure liter pine. The press was turned by a tractor but had been turned by a mule in years past. I took my son the see the operation back then but now I need to take the grandkids. There is a an old syrup mill near my house that was used probably 150 years ago.

 

[jinman]

There were several farmers in my county who made syrup every year. Some of them would leave the "skimmings" in the syrup kettle after the syrup making process. It would ferment, and some of the help who lived on or near the farm would stay drunk on it for weeks. You would see some of them in town on Saturday afternoon, looking absolutely terrible. That stuff was supposed to cause a terrible hangover.

My uncle used to tell the story of how a man he knew made the mistake of letting his skimmin's sit too long before feeding them to his hogs. He said the hogs all got so drunk they couldn't stand up and rolled over on their backs with their legs in the air. The story may not be true, but it sure leaves a funny picture in my imagination.

The real work with sugar cane was the harvest. We first had to go through the field and strip off the leaves using machetes. I don't know why we didn't do everything at once, but I do remember we had so many leaves between the rows that it was hard to walk. I think the idea may have been to let the cane mature awhile and produce a higher sugar content.

Next, we came back and topped the cane in preparation for harvest. The harvest consisted of driving a tractor with a trailer beside the rows while cutting the cane off at the ground level and piling it onto the trailer.

One of the final jobs was saving your seed cane until the next year. We built a ground pit and put in a 6" layer of cane followed by a layer of leaves and tops for an airspace. We kept building layers this way until the pile was about 3' tall and then we covered the whole thing with dirt. At planting time the next season, we opened the seed cane pit and planted the cane. I'm not sure, but I seem to remember cutting sections of the stalks with eyes on them rather than just laying the whole cane stalk down in a row.

Normally, we would plant in a different location each year and let our stubble from the previous year also sprout. The stubble wouldn't produce cane as big as the new crop, but it was no work to plant and produced a fair crop.

Did I mention pumping water out of a neighbor's pond with a trash pump for irrigation and also pumping from a fresh water spring? Well. . . . I'll save that. I'm way too longwinded on this subject already.

 

[greenmule]

Helped make mollasses for years growing up,planted the cane seed,run a little pony pulling a cultivator,hoed it,thinned it,bladed it,cut it,and ground it up.
anybody know what the skimming hole is?

 

[bearcat73]

Some of them would leave the "skimmings" in the syrup kettle after the syrup making process. It would ferment, and some of the help who lived on or near the farm would stay drunk on it for weeks

That's hilarious!

 

[JB4310]

Here's the cookhouse showing the "serpentine" cookpan. He had some guys fab his up out of stainless!

Looks like a maple sap evaporator, what does it taste like?
Is it just sweet or does it have more flavor like maple syrup?

JB.

 

[jinman]

Looks like a maple sap evaporator, what does it taste like?
Is it just sweet or does it have more flavor like maple syrup?

JB.

It's a stronger flavor than maple syrup, but not as strong as sorghum. It's somewhere in-between.

 

[Bird]

It's a stronger flavor than maple syrup, but not as strong as sorghum. It's somewhere in-between.

My wife does not like sorghum molasses, but I sure do.

 

[Depmandog]

I remember a local farmer that always made sorghum. His granddaughter was a teacher at the elementary school, and she would arrange a field trip to the farm. That was the first time I was there, class field trip They gave each kid a piece of cane to chew on while the ole mule walked in circles and the batch cooked. Talk about some wired kids!

We went back a few other times to buy some sorghum. His health failed shortly after that, hadn't thought of that old cane press for years!! Great memories, thanks for the thread!!

Edit: I didn't realize this thread was so old - oh well still great walk down memory lane.

 

[forgeblast]

I was just looking at this, we ended up getting some free sorghum seeds as a packet from buying seeds from baker creek. I looked at sugar presses wow! the cost was huge.