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!