- Hi, I'm jim mcdonald.
I'm an herbalist.
I live in Michigan.
As we like to do in Michigan,
I live like kind of right here,
and I want to show you how to make a pretty awesome syrup,
because syrups are pretty cool.
And there's all kinds of different ways
you can take hawthorn. You can take hawthorn as a tea,
you could make it in a tincture,
you could make it in a syrup.
And we're going to do a syrup,
but we're going to do special kind of syrup.
We are going to do an apple cider reduction syrup,
which is something that I learned about
from my friend Lynn Rosseto Kasper.
Who, actually...Lynn Rosseto Kasper is my friend,
but she has no idea who I am.
She used to do a public radio show
called "The Splendid Table,"
and it was a great cooking show.
And I loved listening to it, and she's very affable.
And so I felt like I got to know her, you know.
when I would be cooking and she'd be making stuff.
I found this awesome recipe for butternut squash
roasted with a cider reduction syrup,
and the way that they made the cider reduction syrup
is you took a quart of sweet apple cider
and then you reduced it down from four parts to one.
So a quart to a cup.
And then when you do that,
you thicken it up, and it's got sugars in it,
and it turns into a syrup.
And I made that for a long time.
It was really wonderful.
But one day I thought, what if I make,
what I could put herbs in here?
Because I'm an herbalist. That's what I do.
And I think, you know, there's things,
and I just think what you can do this in your own life, too.
Whatever you're doing, you just stop
and think what would happen if I put herbs in here,
and sometimes like with this syrup,
it turns out really awesome.
So what we're going to do is we're going to take
some hawthorn berries,
and this is Crataegus monogyna,
but hawthorns are largely interchangeable
between different species.
Maybe not entirely, but largely interchangeable.
So if there's a hawthorn that grows near you
that you're collecting, you can use those, too.
These happen to be dried Crataegus monogyna berries.
And then sometimes I throw in frozen blueberries.
We don't really have any frozen blueberries right now.
We do have some dried bilberries,
and bilberries are awesome. Vaccinium myrtillus.
Probably use many different, you could use huckleberries,
you could use black raspberries,
you can use whatever kind of dark colored berries you want.
Because one of the things
that we're trying to get here is a lot of anthocyanins.
Anthocyanins are kind of flavonoid,
and flavonoids are great anti-inflammatories
and antioxidants for your heart
and your cardiovascular system.
You don't really need to remember anthocyanin,
you don't need to remember flavonoid,
or flavonoid, flavonoid, flavonoid.
I always have to look that up.
That's like hard to remember.
I get it's, an I or an O, I'm not sure. It's not an A.
What you can remember
is that like dark pigments in berries are good for you.
So when you're thinking, I want to do something
that is good, that helps to lessen inflammatory processes
in my cardiovascular system, rather than thinking big words,
you can think I'm going to like figure out
how I can get more dark colored berries into me.
And hawthorn is a dark colored berry.
Bilberry or blueberry, dark colored berry.
And again, we could think about huckleberries.
We could think about different kinds of dewberries.
We could think about blackberries.
There's all kinds of different berries.
Just try to get them into you.
Hawthorn has the additional awesomeness
of being a cardiac tonic,
or maybe a cardiovascular trophorestorative,
another like cardiac tonic,
cardiovascular trophorestorative.
It's a bigger word,
but what that means is that hawthorn
seems to have an ability that like has a strengthening
and restorative action on your heart
and your cardiovascular function.
And that's pretty awesome.
So we're going to use that as the basis.
We're going to add some bilberries in
to give it a little bit more flavor and some more color
and make it even better tasting.
And we're going to use our apple cider as the base.
So this syrup has no honey.
It has no added sugar outside of what is in the apple juice.
And it's really simple to make.
So what we're going to do, we have a pot here.
You want to make sure your pot is big enough
for the stuff that you're going to put in it.
Again, we're going from four parts down to one.
So here's two half gallons.
They make up whole gallon.
We're eventually going to reduce it down to a quart,
and this pot's going to fit everything.
So let's start putting stuff in.
(bottle opens)
(jim hums)
(liquid pours)
Now, ideally you want to get organic apple cider,
because why wouldn't you.
You can get it from containers like this,
or if there's an apple orchard
that you can get cider directly from,
and you want to use that, that's all the better,
especially if you can support your local apple orchard.
Now you might think like, oh, I want to make sure
that I get not pasteurized cider because that's better,
but we're going to be heating this up anyway,
so that doesn't matter.
That's nothing to stress out about.
So we've got our cider in here.
(bag tears)
Don't get away.
Now we're going to put in a pound of hawthorn berries,
(berries pour)
(bag tears)
and roughly like a half pound of bilberries.
You could use more. You could use less.
I'm not going to weigh it. I'm just going to eyeball it.
'Cause it's like making soup or something.
(berries pour)
These are very food like herbs,
so we don't need to be like super specific with our doses.
That looks about half.
So we'll stir everything up,
get everything all mixed up and wet.
And then we turn the heat on,
and initially I'm going to turn the heat on high
and get the temperature going.
And then once it gets to like a simmer,
I'm going to turn it down.
I don't necessarily want to have this
like at a rolling boil the whole time.
That will make the process go by faster,
but I tend to like when I'm extracting things
more to do like a low simmer over a longer period of time.
But don't worry, you don't have to watch me
just standing here over the course of an hour or two
while this slowly reduces. What we're
going to do is we're going to get it to, you know,
just at a boil, we're going to bring it
down to a low simmer,
and we're going to let it reduce about from a gallon
to about a half gallon, then we're going to strain it out.
So in the meantime, let's let it do that.
Again, if you want to, you can speed up the process
by letting it boil faster,
but I like to do things low and slow when I can.
And then I'll come back and look and see how it's reduced.
And what we want to do is we want to reduce this
when it's about halfway cooked down.
So we started with a gallon.
When it gets to about two quarts or half gallon,
then we can strain it out,
and then put the strained syrup back in there,
and reduce it back down to one quart.
And the reason we strain it when it's like halfway reduced
is because the apple juice is less syrupy,
and less of it sticks to the berries.
So, you know, it's just easier to strain.
It's just a practical thing.
It doesn't need to be perfect.
You don't need to like pour it into a measuring cup
and make sure there's exactly two quarts or a half gallon.
You can just kind of like eyeball
and think like it started here, now it's down to here.
That's about halfway done.
(clock ticks)
Okay. So this looks like it's down about halfway.
Again, you could measure. I'm not
going to measure. That just seems like too much work.
It's, you know, it was here, now it's there,
that seems like halfway.
And I'm going to turn off the burner
and pour from this big pot that had a gallon.
Maybe it's roughly a half gallon. I'm going
to pour it through the strainer into this little pot.
And I'm going to try not to stain everything around me,
including my clothes.
So I should get behind it and pour slowly.
And while you're doing it,
like try to keep your eye on the pot.
If you notice that the water starts spilling over the sides,
that means your pot wasn't big enough,
and you probably want to stop.
Got most of the stuff out of there, so that's mostly empty.
I've got some barriers on the counter there.
I'll want to clean those up
because if they're on the hot burner,
and they're, it's apple cider, it's going to be sugary.
It's going to burn on there. It'll be harder to clean.
But now, because this one is sitting
a little bit submerged into the tea,
I want to let it drain a little bit.
And one thing that I can do
is I can let it sit on there and drip down,
and that slowly over time is going to catch everything
that's dripping from it.
If I wanted, not while it's steaming hot,
but I could press it out in a pressing cloth.
Or if you have an herb press,
you can do that to get more of the juice out of it.
But sometimes I just let it drip down, right?
It just depends on what I'm needing to do.
This is not a preparation
where I'm focused on like, you know,
every so much of the syrup
is going to have so much of the herb into it.
Like I've got a rough proportion in my head,
but I'm not needing to dose it.
These are very food like herbs.
They're very safe to use,
and so therefore I can just be like,
the syrup is healthful and yummy,
and I can take it by the spoonful.
I don't need to stress too much out
on like figuring out milligrams.
If you are into that, you can do that,
but I'm not going to do that here.
You can make it however you want to.
Now I'm going to put this hot syrup back on.
I'm going to turn it back to get it at a low simmer
and reduce this from roughly around two quarts to a quart.
That takes us from a gallon to a quart.
That's four parts to one.
If you wanted to make a smaller batch,
you could start with a quart,
use a quarter of the amount of herbs
that I mentioned earlier,
however that works out mathematically,
and reduce it down to a cup.
But then you only have a cup of syrup,
which is not enough, right?
So it makes more sense to do a larger volume
and take the time to do it,
and then you can store the syrup for later use.
So let's let this reduce a little bit more.
(clock ticks)
Okay. So it looks like we're down to roughly about a quart.
How does this taste?
That's because we want to...
you want to see whether it tastes good, right?
Not everything herbal tastes awesome,
but this tastes awesome.
So.
Oh, my God.
It's just so good.
Oh, wait, you can't...
I just...I can't put the spoon back in here.
Like, if it's for me and my family, I can do that.
I mean, maybe it depends on which family,
like I think my 19 year old would be like,
"no, don't do that".
(offscreen person laughs)
But right, I don't want to taste it.
If I'm selling stuff to like friends or community
at a farmer's market, I can't taste it.
There's the GMP things,
and then it's just like, you shouldn't do that
if you're giving it to other people.
So I'm not going to put the spoon back in there,
even though I really want to,
but I am going to, hopefully without spilling,
I'm going to turn the heat off,
pour into my measuring cup.
We will see how well I eyeballed the quart.
That's pretty good.
It's a little bit less than a quart.
It looks like it's about three and a half cups.
That's fine.
Like, that's totally okay.
So I have a syrup.
It's a cider reduction.
It's really quite sweet.
The hawthorn comes through.
The bilberry comes through really strong.
It's pretty delicious.
So like, how do I use this now?
I can put it in a bottle after it cools down.
I can put it in a bottle
and just pour spoonfuls and do that a few times a day,
or I can pour a spoonful into a tea and swish it around.
It's like a sweetener instead of using honey.
Or if I have like seltzer water,
I can pour them into my seltzer water.
Or if I have vanilla ice cream,
and I don't think that vanilla ice cream
will neutralize the awesomeness of this syrup,
I can pour it over vanilla ice cream.
If I do think vanilla ice cream
will neutralize the awesomeness of this syrup,
then I don't get to have vanilla ice cream
with this syrup on it, which is kind of sad,
but, you know, do what you need to do.
I mean, but there's a lot of different ways you can take it.
Now as with most syrups
that you're not making with large amounts
of refined white sugar,
this is not going to be shelf stable indefinitely.
I've had it keep for weeks or months
in just the refrigerator,
but sometimes your syrup can get moldy,
and sometimes your syrup can ferment.
In which case you have like a hawthorn berry cider right?
It's kind of like hawthorn berry mead, but it's a cider,
because it's only apple juice.
And that would still be kind of good,
but if that's not what you meant to make,
then maybe you don't want that happen.
Just gesturing with my spoon.
So the way that I often store syrups, the easy way is,
given that you care more about your own use
of the refrigerator than the other people that you live with
who want to have food in there,
is I will pour
the bulk of this syrup into a quart mason jar.
and I'll stick it in the freezer,
and it'll be frozen.
And it's preserved indefinitely when it's frozen.
And then I'll take a little bit of syrup
and pour it into a small, maybe like eight ounce bottle.
And then I can sip off of that bottle,
or maybe a 16 ounce bottle.
I can sip off of that bottle,
and then when I run out of that, I can pour my frozen syrup.
I can thaw out or run it under hot water,
and then fill up my dosage bottle that's in the fridge.
And that way you'll never have any of your syrup go bad
because we all know that sometimes we make something
that's good for us, that we're taking every day.
is like an awesome hawthorn,
bilberry, apple cider reduction syrup
that's a tonic for our cardiovascular system,
and we need to be taking it every day.
And then we get busy
and distracted by the craziness of the world.
And then we forget,
and it gets pushed back into the back of our fridge.
And then we find it, and we open it up,
and it doesn't smell right.
And then we feel like, oh, no, it went bad.
I shouldn't have done that.
If you keep a smaller bottle in your fridge,
if you forget about it, and you lose a little bit,
you just lose a little bit,
but you won't lose like a quart of it, right?
So having the excess in the freezer
just preserves it indefinitely.
If you don't have, you know, the freezer space to do that
or you live with people who,
they want to use their freezer for food, go figure,
and you know how to can,
you could can that and have it in a can.
As soon as you open the can is not preserved anymore,
so again, you know, having it in pint size at the most,
but copper pint jars that you open as needed is a good idea.
But really what you want to do is you want to figure out
how to just get this into your routine.
Oh, you can put it on pancakes
if you do pancakes out of whatever things
that have or don't have gluten in them that you want.
Or waffles or whatever, just think about like,
how can I get this in?
It doesn't need to be the same thing every day.
Doesn't need to be spoonfuls every day.
It doesn't need to be on, you know,
hot, grainy breakfast things every day.
It doesn't need to be on ice cream.
It probably shouldn't be on ice cream every day,
but just having this in your routine,
and all the different kinds of ways you can do it
is a way that we can make this
just a super yummy part of being healthy, which is our goal.
Make healthiness yummy.