Spruce Tip Sugar | Within The Wild (2024)

FAQs

Spruce Tip Sugar | Within The Wild? ›

Place the spruce tips and the sugar into a food processor. Pulse process until the spruce is broken down but not so far that the sugar becomes powdered. Preheat the oven to 225℉. Spread the spruce-sugar mixture over a parchment-lined baking sheet.

Spruce tips can be eaten in a variety of ways from raw to a syrup. Many of the best recipes I have found are German. Recipes like spruce tip salads and chocolate covered spruce tips. My youngest daughter, Mia, likes to simply snack on them straight from the trees.

There are different types of spruce trees, and all spruce tips are edible. When identifying spruce trees for foraging, simply look for the bright green tips emerging from branches in high-spring. Then of course, look at the needle formation and color to confirm your identification.

Spruce tips, the young, green early growth on spruce trees are one of the easiest foraged foods you can harvest. They're delicious in the right place, but have a strong citrus flavor raw and need to be used carefully or they can ruin a dish.

Medicinally, spruce tips can be used as a therapy to help ease lung congestion. It's antiseptic properties can help with pneumonia, whooping cough, and croup. As a liniment, salve or oil spruce tips also work well to help ease joint and muscle pain.

They are the most tasty when they are between 0.5″ – 1.5″ long. Spruce tip buds when collected young produce a light lemony flavoured herbal tea. Since not all evergreen trees new growth are edible, it is vital that experienced foragers can identify the edible spruce.

Spruce trees also provide foraging opportunity all year round. The needles are edible and most commonly used to make a hot tea, which is steeped (not boiled) to retain its nutritional quality. All parts of the tree are non-toxic.

Hardened spruce sap (gum) formed at the site where a branch was broken from the tree. Gum or hardened sap from spruce trees has been used as a traditional medicine by Northern Canadian Indigenous people. It is used as a chewing gum and also melted to make a glue to fix canvas boats or plug holes.

The smell of this sugar brings the forest into the kitchen and into our food. We use spruce sugar on cookies, cakes, and on savory dishes. We use it sometimes in fancy co*cktails at the bar.

Spruce tips have a range of flavors depending on their stage of maturity: herbal, fruity, citrus, resinous. They play well with both sweet and savory dishes. All spruce varieties (from the pine or Pinaceae family) are edible.

What month do you harvest spruce tips? ›

In early spring, spruce trees produce feathery new growth covered in brown, papery sheaths. If you pull off one of the sheathes, you'll see young needles, just beginning to expand. Young spruce tips can be harvested from the time they emerge until they begin to stiffen.

TRADITIONAL USES BY INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

Almost every part of the white spruce can be used for clothing and weaving. The roots are used for baskets and sewing seams, the bark is used for serving dishes. Young trees can be used to make snowshoes and bows.

This damage is often thought to be caused by an insect or disease problem, but is usually the work of a hungry red squirrel. Rather than just eating the buds, these pesky rodents prefer to first prune the branch tip from the tree, eat the bud then discard the branch.

Introduction: Spruce Tea

According to the research I conducted, it contains vitamin C and has been used as a decongestant. Note: If you are pregnant or are trying to get pregnant you should not drink spruce tea as it contains an ingredient that can act as an abortifacient.

The tips are the true delicacy, but the tea is tasty as well. Strong, spicy and buttery, very rich in color and flavor. The woodsy, resiny taste is more pronounced in spruce tea than in pine, and unlike pine I don't find it palatable cold.

Spruce tips aren't the only edible part of spruce trees but are the most practical and worthwhile. Historically, the cambium (inner bark layer) and seeds were harvested and used as food sources.

As far as my knowledge goes, all species in the Pinus genus are edible, though some do have cautions regarding pregnancies, mostly stemming from livestock consuming large amounts of pine. Nonetheless, please research your local species before consuming it.

Spruce gum is a chewing material made from the resin of spruce trees. In North America, spruce resin was chewed by Native Americans and was later introduced to the early American pioneers and was sold commercially by the 19th century, by John B. Curtis among others. It has also been used as an adhesive.