Sweet as syrup

Published 12:16 am Sunday, September 25, 2016

If I go too long without pancakes I start getting a little nervous. Especially when the weather starts to cool off a little bit. There’s nothing like a stack of hot cakes (or is it hot stack cakes?) to start the day off with a full belly and a sugar high from the syrup.

Pancakes represent a special treat for me, as they were pretty rare growing up. All the stars had to line up just right for Saturday morning pancakes. I don’t have to have them just for breakfast either; I’m fine with them at suppertime or even lunch. Ideally, if we make pancakes at the house I like to have a stack of leftovers to last the next day or day and a half. Who says I don’t look to the future?

So, if pancakes are the treat, what’s the treat for the treat? Syrup! Syrup to pancakes is like the whipped cream and cherry are to the milkshake. Like a top hat to a magician. Like King Kong to the Empire State Building!

Sure, I’ve grabbed a leftover pancake the next morning and, having used up all the syrup the day before, dunked it in my coffee in a poor imitation of a doughnut for breakfast, and I’ve experimented … flirted if you will … with jelly as a pancake topping. But in the end, pancakes and syrup were made for each other like peanut butter and jelly, like driving fast and teenage boys or like bad toupees and TV sports announcers.

A picturesque flow

In the ads the syrup pours on top of the stack over the side of the pancakes in a picturesque flow of syrupy cascades. Me, I lift the whole stack starting with the next to the bottom pancake and douse it and then do the next pancake up, layer by layer until I get to the top, making sure there is no syrup-free dry spot in sight. When my fork cuts down through the stack the syrup squeezes out like soap suds from a squeezed sponge.

Pancake syrup is a magical elixir that I hope would exist even if there no such thing as pancakes. For me, pancake syrup isn’t just for pancakes anymore. There are waffles and French toast as well.

With waffles I make sure each indented square gets its share of syrup. French toast I arrange with the crusts to the outside so that a small pond of syrup forms in the low center area where the toast has been cut. But I don’t stop there. I use syrup to lightly top English muffins, to put a dash in cream of wheat, as an ice cream topper, to sweeten coffee, on muffins and on biscuits. In the Christmas movie “Elf” from a few years ago, Buddy the Elf puts syrup on spaghetti. I’ve never tried that … but I bet I do.

All kinds of delicious treats

What exactly is syrup? Syrup is primarily a mix of water and sugar. The variety comes in where the sugar originates. That’s what gives the syrup its flavor, color and nutrients.

Since sugar is granular and can crystallize, creating a type of syrup with it helps keep the sugar in a more liquid state, which helps when combining in cooking and in preserving it.

Honey is similar to syrup in that it’s sugar that has been processed (in this case by bees) and it can last for long periods of time … sometimes even thousands of years as jars have been found in mummy tombs in Egypt that still had honey in them.

Syrup is made by putting sugars in water and boiling and or cooking them. They can be boiled several times to get different products from them from each cooking session. And, syrups can then be combined with a variety of other things to get all kinds of delicious treats.

Syrup for pancakes

When talking about pancake syrup we most often think of maple syrup. Pancake syrup is a category of syrup rather than a type of syrup since we don’t actually make syrup from pancakes but for pancakes. Maple syrup is made from the sap of the maple tree, which grows up north in places like Vermont and Canada. It has a high sugar content that makes for a really sweet syrup, and the maple gives it a distinct flavor. I’ve heard that you actually get a more “maple-y” flavor if you buy the Grade B quality instead of the Grade A. Check the bottle to see the quality and where the maple syrup is from.

The most basic syrup is called simple syrup and is just sugar boiled in water to be used to sweeten rather than flavor. Simple sugar is used in those mixed tropical drinks with the umbrellas in them you get in Polynesian tiki restaurants like Trader Vic’s in Atlanta because just pouring granulated sugar in a cold drink doesn’t dissolve it easily. Anyone that’s wanted sweet iced tea somewhere north of Kentucky knows you’ve got to stir that sugar an awful long time before it blends and doesn’t just settle in the bottom of the glass.

Karo Syrup is the brand name of syrup made from corn. It showed up in tin containers in 1902. Before that, you took your own jug or jar to the grocer’s and he would fill you up with the liquid sweetener.

Karo started with dark and light syrup and later came up with a “waffle” syrup and more recently a ‘lite” product with fewer calories. Karo Syrup introduced the recipe for the now famous “pecan pie” in the 1930s and it’s said that in some places in the South it’s still referred to as “Kayro pie.” For pecan pie I say “Thank you, Karo Syrup … thank you.” Karo syrups provide more than just sweetening.

Karo Dark, for example, makes a good glaze for meat because it holds in the moisture of the meat, helping to keep it from drying out.

From molasses to pirates

The funny thing about a jar of molasses is that when you look at the ingredients listed it says “Ingredients: Molasses.” And that’s it.

Molasses is specifically a heavy cooked-down syrup made from sugar cane. Because sugar cane grows in the tropics it’s mainly from the Caribbean and points south. Some sugar cane is grown in the U.S. in Florida and Louisiana, for example, but it’s fairly rare.

Once the sugar cane has been cooked into molasses, the molasses is then a primary ingredient for making rum, which in turn is a primary ingredient to make pirates.

The sugar cane juice can be brought to a boil several times, and different quality of syrup created each time. The third boiling is the strongest, darkest and least sweet as most of the sugars have been taken out by then.

This third product is the famous “blackstrap molasses.” Blackstrap can even be bitter. Its thick, dark syrup does have lots of nutrients in it, with up to 20 percent of the daily requirements for calcium, magnesium, iron and manganese per tablespoon, and it’s been taken as a “health” supplement for centuries.

You can also get molasses from sugar beets. In this country beet molasses is used primarily in industrial-level food sweetening, like high sucrose corn syrup. But in Europe, the table version of beet molasses can be found on toast, breads and even Euro-pancakes. German Grafschafter Brand Sugar Beet Syrup is made from freshly harvested sugar beets. From the name you can tell it’s more of a German/European thing than a southern thing. Cooked beet juice is not the molasses I grew up with. They say beet molasses maintains a lot of the nutritional values of the fresh beets, but I’m happy getting that from the pickled beets I’m used to.

A mule walking in a circle

Sorghum is the real home-grown syrup for the South. Sorghum is a high stalked grass full of sugar-like sugar cane.

There are two types of sorghum, sweet sorghum and grain sorghum. Grain sorghum is grown for animal feed and forage while the sweet sorghum is grown for its sugar.

Like any syrup, sorghum is made from the cooked juice of the plant. In old days a sorghum mill consisted of a mule walking in a circle to move gears that crushed the stalks and squeezed out the juice. Then there was a fireplace with a large vat where the juice was boiled down into sorghum. Replace the mule with a motor and put the cooker inside and you’ve got the same process modernized.

A jar of sorghum was always in my grandfather’s kitchen. He taught me to take a spoonful and mix it with a spoonful of butter to take any of the bitter taste out, swirl it around until there was a thick, golden paste, and then put that on a hot biscuit and watch it melt. It was a very different and delicious alternative to pancake syrup. And there’s something enjoyable about continuing a long southern tradition. And since sorghum and molasses are frequently used in recipes for everything from sweet bread to BBQ sauce, there’s lots of ways to put some sweet South in your mouth.

You’ve probably guessed by now that I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth when it comes to syrups. But if you think I’ve never met a syrup I didn’t like, you’d be wrong. About once a year during the cold and flu season, the maple syrup and sorghum stay on the shelf … and out comes the cough syrup. Yuck!

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in film and video production.