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.

Making Homemade Sugarcane Syrup

Disclaimer:  Do not try this at home.  This project is a fool's errand.  It is an inefficient use of time and a surefire way to waste $20 and an afternoon.  I've done this before and should know better, but like a moth to the flame, I felt like I needed to do it again - for some reason.  I guess I'm just hard-headed and like to prove to myself that I can do something.

The heirloom Louisiana sugarcane that an old fellow from Jennings gave me continues to come up year after year.  I can remember my grandfather using his Case pocketknife to slice a sliver of sugarcane for me to chew when I was a little guy.  It was sweet!  This cane in the garden, and I'm not exaggerating grows 12 feet tall.  It begins to lean over, taking up valuable garden space.

I decided, against my better judgment, that it was time to make homemade cane syrup.  We are out of the Steen's Cane Syrup made down the road in Abbeville where it's been made since 1910.  I harvested several fat canes and trudged out of the garden.

The first thing you do is vigorously clean the cane.  I just use a bucket of water and an old T-shirt for a rag and I scrub.  Some of the cane is green and some has a purple tint.  At each joint, small roots emerge.  If you were to lay this cane flat in a trench, a new cane plant would emerge at each joint.  In fact, if anyone is in the area and would like to start this in your garden, stop by, I'd love to share a cane with you.

I use some pruning clippers to chop the cane into small pieces.  If I had the equipment, instead of doing this step, I'd feed the cane whole through a grinder or tool that mashes the cane until the juice comes out.  But I don't have that.  I got a 5 gallon bucket of cane.  It was heavy.

Here's an up=close look at the cane.  You can see the sugar in it.  If you would take your pocketknife and slice a piece off and chew, you'd be onto something real good, I'm telling you.

Here is my sugarcane apparatus.  It's merely a crawfish boiling pot, but it serves the same purpose.  There's $20 of propane in the tank and I've added 10 gallons of water to the pot.

I poured all the cut up cane into the pot of water that will be boiling.  The basket inside the pot normally is full of crawfish or crabs.  Today it's sugarcane.  We will boil it for two full hours.  By that time all the sugar should be removed from the cane and in the water.

Here's the depleted cane after I pulled the basket out of the water.  If I'm not mistaken, this is similar to something called bagasse - dry, pulpy residue that remains after the sugar is removed from the cane.

I boiled for another several hours with the lid off until my propane tank was empty.  I poured the liquid into a big gumbo pot and brought it inside to continue boiling.  It is quite a mess to do inside.  On the brightside, it makes your house smell great!  Notice the foam on top.

I continually skim off the foam and impurities using a big spoon.

When I first started boiling, the liquid looked like this.  The object is to boil off the water.  What's remaining is syrup.  Let's get the water boiling!

Notice the level of liquid in the pot is reducing and the liquid is getting darker.

I moved the liquid into a smaller dutch oven.  The liquid level continues to drop as the water boils off.  The color of the liquid continues to darken.

I moved the liquid into a saucepan now.  The liquid is more like a sticky slurry now.  You ought to smell it!

And finally. We are done.  Would you look at that.  Homemade cane syrup in a quart jar.  It is really strong.  Sweet, but with a slightly bitter taste.  It'll be perfect on biscuits or pancakes.

The problem is I started out with 10 gallons of liquid and although I made syrup, I made 1 pint of syrup.  It would have been cheaper and easier to drive down to the store and buy it.  But we proved that we can lose money and waste time.  But we also had a good time doing it and we have a pint of syrup that we produced, albeit inefficiently, on the homestead.

We'll pour this over biscuits and pancakes and tell ourselves that its the best syrup we ever tasted.  We'll believe it, too!

Insurance That Costs Nothing

Four years ago a friend of our drove up into our driveway in his old pickup truck.  He got out and said he had something for me.  I like talking to this gentleman.  He is brilliant and knows about everything.  He likes telling stories and spinning yarns about growing up in the country and on the bayou and experienced country life, truly living off the land.  We often share vegetables with him and from time to time he brings me some interesting exotic seeds to plant.  Last year he brought us two quarts of blackberries that were as big as a quarter.  I was curious as to what he was bringing me.

We walked around to the back of his truck and he lowered the tailgate.  I thought an alligator or a snapping turtle might pop out.  He reached in and grabbed four stalks of sugarcane.  It was heirloom, Louisiana purple ribbon cane.  He told me that most sugarcane grown around here now is hybrid cane.  It doesn't grow that tall and is bred to produce sugar - lots and lots of sugar.  He told me that he was sharing it with me for insurance.  He didn't want me to eat it.  He wanted me to plant it and keep it growing so that if he ever lost his, he could come to me to get more.  I thanked him and promised I would do so.  I did take out my pocketknife and eat a chunk of it, though.

In 2019, the sugarcane is still growing.  I re-plant it every year.  This old cane is not short.  I am not exaggerating when I tell you that every stalk is at least ten feet tall - some even taller!

Right now in Louisiana, we are full-swing into "grinding season."  This is when commercial sugarcane producers state wide are harvesting cane and grinding it where it will be taken to sugar mills for processing.  I work for an oil company that is currently working non-stop to keep these farmers supplied with diesel to run their equipment.  These farmers are working throughout the night to bring the crop in.  You can see them working in the fields with lights on.  Their tractors and trucks track mud onto the farm roads.  A nuisance, yes, but I'm willing to live with it in order to get some Steen's Cane Syrup for my biscuits.

Here's a LINK to a local syrup maker that's been a local favorite for over 106 years.  I love this stuff.  I wanted to try my hand at making cane syrup at home.  In this Post From 2017 you can click and read where I walk through the steps of successfully making a batch of homemade syrup from some of the cane that our friend gave us.  It was a fun experiment and I enjoyed eating the syrup until we used it all up.  On a pretty evening last week, I was admiring the tall sugar cane in the garden and planning on what I was going to do with it.

For one thing, it is time to harvest it and plant a few stalks to keep my end of the bargain to our friend, and I'll certainly do that.  It is simple to plant.  You dig a four inch trench, lay the stalk in the trench and cover with dirt.  New sprouts of sugar cane will emerge at each joint in the cane.  I haven't decided if I'll make another batch of syrup or not.  It is not economical to make in small batches as I learned from our experiment.  I will definitely cut and eat some.  That is a given.

Earlier this week I cut four stalks and we've given them to another friend to plant.  They want to establish it in their garden.  It will be insurance if our sugar cane ever succumbs to crop failure or freeze.

I like this form of "insurance" as you don't have to pay for it.  It pays you.  I think that's SWEET!

Harvesting Louisiana Purple Sugar Cane (Part II: Processing into Pure Cane Syrup)

In YESTERDAY'S POST we talked about our Louisiana Purple Sugarcane - both growing it and harvesting the first crop from our garden.  After cutting it, we put the cane in a wagon and hauled it to the back yard where we started processing it.  The first thing we did was to strip all of the leaves off of it.

As we finished, we dropped the purple sugarcane in a stack on the ground.

We used a rag to scrub the sugarcane clean.  There is a build-up of a black smut-like substance that must be cleaned off.  We don't want that or any dirt to get into our final product.

Once cleaned, we then use a machete to begin chopping the cane into two-inch long pieces.

We are going to be processing our sugarcane into pure cane syrup.  We also cut chunks into slivers that we chewed.  It was so sweet!  I can remember chewing cut up cane as a young boy.  It brought back good memories.  The more we cut, the more our pot began to fill up.

Before we knew it, we had 3 big pots full of cut up sugarcane ready to be processed into syrup.

I put the cane into our crawfish boiling pot, filled with water to cover and then lit the butane burner underneath the pot.

Pretty soon, there was sweet smelling steam emanating from our pot.  It boiled.  And boiled.  And boiled some more.

After about 3 hours, I pulled the basket of cut up cane out of the water and let it drain real good back into the pot.  By this point all of the sweetness has boiled out of the cane cubes and is now contained in the water as sugarcane juice.  The cut up cane will be trench composted into the garden.

We kept boiling the water/sugarcane juice as we watched the LSU football game and then went to vote in the election.  I'd say it boiled for another 2 hours while the liquid reduced due to evaporation.  I also skimmed foam off the top repeatedly.

Finally what was left in the pot was syrup.  I poured it through a fine sieve to filter out any pieces of cane and other particles.

After 5 + hours of boiling, not counting the time spent harvesting and chopping, we had a little less than a quart of homemade sugarcane syrup.  Okay, I'll admit it, from an economical standpoint, that is not a very efficient conversion.  It is much cheaper to just drive to the store and buy some Steen's Pure Cane Syrup.  But, I will also say (I'm biased, I know) that this homemade sugarcane syrup is delicious!  I love Steen's, but I think ours has a better flavor.

Meanwhile, we have more immature sugarcane growing in the garden that will be ready for harvest a little later.  I also planted two more stalks in the garden soil to keep our sugarcane crop producing next year.

It was a fun experiment to see if we could make our own syrup and we found that we could.  It was just a lot of work and time to do it and was a good lesson on economies of scale!

Checking In On the Muscadines

Back in May 2014 we planted a muscadine vine out in the side yard.  It has grown and we pick muscadines off of it each year.  The yield seems to increase every year. Last year Russ taught me how to effectively prune it to maximize production.  It seems to be pretty happy despite the fact that the soil in the side yard is poor and compacted.  If you dig with a shovel, it is like digging in a parking lot - hard and packed earth.  I've been amending the soil and will continue to do so until I get it where I want it to be.

Meanwhile we are still going to get a nice crop.  I like to make jelly with the muscadines.  Tricia likes to come out to the "vineyard" on late summer afternoons and eat muscadines right off the vine when the fruit is sun-warmed.  Delicious!  I guess if there is a downside to these, it would be that they have many seeds and you have to spit a lot.  Back in THIS POST FROM 2013 I chronicled how we made new wine with some grapes from our neighbors.  If we have a nice enough harvest, I'd like to try to make a batch of new wine with muscadines and see how it would turn out.

This year I've found a recipe to make muscadine syrup and I'm going to try that.  It seems like topping a homemade blueberry and pecan pancake with muscadine syrup.  Forget Wheaties.   That, my friends, is the breakfast of champions!

Clusters of Muscadines

Stay tuned and later this summer, I'll post how the muscadine syrup making experiment goes.