The Sweet Stuff

Every year it dies back when it freezes.  And every year, it comes back with a vengeance.  I'm talking about sugar cane.  Years back, an older gentleman gave me some to plant in the event he lost his.  It was a form of insurance, you might say.  If his died, he could come get a cane from mine and replant. That's been years and years ago.  I passed by his house the other day and looked out at his sugarcane thriving.  This afternoon a neighbor from down the road pulled in and inquired about my sugarcane, asking if he could buy some from me to get it started at his house.  I told him it was given to me and I'll give some to him.  He's a welder by trade and told me he would fabricate a sugarcane crusher or press.  More on that at the end.

Here's the 2025 crop of sugarcane.  It seems to get thicker and taller every year.

As an experiment, I cut three mature canes down.  I wanted to try a different method of extracting the juice.  There is a farm in Grant, Louisiana that uses a mule to walk around as cane is fed into a grinder that crushes the cane and juice flows out and is captured in a big kettle.  I don't have a mule or a grinder like that.  

Using some pruning shears, I cut the cane at each joint.  The cane is tough.  It put my shears to a workout, that's for sure.

I got my Chicago Cutlery knife that I usually use for butchering chickens.  Not today.  Today I used the knife to remove the tough outer layer of the cane, exposing the sweet, inner portion.  You could cut it into strips at this point and chew on it.  It is sweet and tasty.

I cut the inner portion of the cane into disks.  You can see that, although fibrous, it is full of sweet sugary liquid that awaits extraction.

A couple of cups at a time, I fed it into a blender and pulsed it on the grind setting.

This yielded a pulpy, sticky mulch.

I know this is incredibly inefficient, but it is the only thing I could think of.  I used a lemon juicer and handful by handful, I squeezed the sugarcane pulp.  Juice would flow out of it as I applied pressure.  The juice was strained in a sieve.

In my experiment, three average sized canes yielded 3 cups of sugarcane juice.  We drank sips of it and also poured it into a smoothie to add some natural sweetener.

I wish you could taste the nice flavor.  I boiled some of this on the stove, allowing the water to evaporate, leaving me with some tasty syrup.

Although a very time-consuming and inefficient process, the experiment resulted in knowing that if we had a better sugarcane juice extracting process, we could make plenty of syrup.  I'm anxious to see if the device that my neighbor is fabricating will be the solution.