Homemade Pancake Syrup

This recipe is so simple! It has only three ingredients, and can be made in less then five minutes.

Ingredients:
2 cups of sugar
1 3/4 cups of water
1 T of maple flavoring (also known as mapleine)

Directions:
Put sugar into pan and cover with water. Stir. Bring to boil and boil for 1 minute. Turn off the stove and mix in maple flavoring. Serve hot off the stove.

Cost to make homemade pancake syrup:

Sugar (1 lb):            $.75
Maple Flavoring:       $.50
Water:                   $0.00
Total:                    $1.25

This is a great alternative to pancake syrup from the store from a budget and nutrition perspective. Enjoy!

A few notes:


You can use as much as 3 cups of sugar, and you can also let the simple syrup boil for longer for a thicker pancake syrup. Also, you can start with 2 teaspoons of maple flavoring and see if that tastes mapley enough for you (3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon). Since you are making it you can customize it to the tastes of your family!

Boiling the simple syrup.

After the maple flavoring is mixed in.

Maple Syrup vs. Imitation Syrup

True confession time: I was raised on Log Cabin, Mrs. Buttersworth, and Aunt Jemima's Syrup (and the generic equivalent). I believed it was maple syrup. Then I met my husband, who was shocked that I not only ate and enjoyed Mrs. Buttersworth, but that I also thought that real maple syrup was too sweet. During the course of our dating, I saw the error of my ways and slowly retrained my taste buds to accept what real maple syrup tasted like.

So what is the difference between maple syrup and imitation maple syrup?


What we call fake or imitation maple syrup actually has a name- pancake syrup, waffle syrup, table syrup, or just syrup. This type of syrup is not allowed to have the word maple in the name because it does not contain any amount of maple in it. 

The ingredients found in real maple syrup is simply maple sap. Maple sap is simply water, sugar, and trace amounts of minerals (good ones like magnesium, zinc, and calcium).

On the other hand, the popular brands of pancake syrup usually contain the following ingredients: corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, water, cellulose gum, caramel color, salt, sodium benzoate and sorbic acid (preservatives), artificial and natural flavors, sodium hexametaphosphate. Yikes! That's a lot of ingredients, most of which were developed in a laboratory.

Unlike the ingredients found in pancake syrup, the ingredients found in maple syrup don't require a Google search to know what you are eating. In case you were wondering that sodium hexablahblah is used as an ingredient in water softeners and detergents, which makes me as the question "Is that really safe to eat?" I think it's pretty safe to say that pancake syrup is not something you want to feed your family.

So, now that we know what's in these two syrups, let's look at how they are made.  I honestly wish I could find pictures of how pancake syrup is made, but like most of the science experiment food from large companies, there are none to be found. It's probably a two fold reason. The first is because there are trade secrets that they don't want to divulge, and the second is probably because nobody would want to eat it if they saw what it looked like before it came in the pretty little bottle.

We do know the process of how real maple syrup is made. It is first gathered from maple trees beginning in late February and lasts for about six weeks. In order for the sap to come out of the tree there needs to be a very specific temperature range: roughly 40 degrees during the day and 20 degrees at night. The temperature plays an important role in the movement of the sap within the tree.

The maple trees are tapped in the trunk with a spout to allow the syrup to drip into a container.  The syrup can be contained in a bucket, a jar, or even a plastic bag as seen below.

Sap dripping into a container. Taken in Holmes County, Ohio.

The maple sap then gets collected and put into an evaporator, where the water is boiled off and the sap is reduced into the syrup we know and love. It does need to get filtered to remove the sugar sand before it is finished and bottled.

Evaporator used in the production of maple syrup.

Here's a picture of a sugarbush along the road.

The choice is simple, maple syrup is superior in both taste and nutrition. There is however a drawback to the real stuff- price. Because of the limited area and time frame from which maple syrup can be harvested and the energy expenses incurred in the reduction process, it is noticeably more expensive then pancake syrup. It's probably at least double the cost, unless you buy it at Costco, Sam's, or BJ's.

For those on a more restricted budget, I have a recipe for homemade pancake syrup that has far less ingredients (and far scarier too!), which I will be sharing in a separate post.

Also, please note that the ingredients listed above for pancake syrup came directly from the Aunt Jemima website. Additionally, Log Cabin does have a pancake syrup made with no High Fructose Corn Syrup, but it still probably has the other scary ingredients in there.

Psoriasis Update

It's been a little more then month ago when I first talked about my psoriasis.  I figured it was time for an update.

Beginning February 1st, I began going to a tanning salon.  There are a whole host of studies that have been done showing the benefits of tanning to psoriasis. Tanning beds (with UVB lights) help the body to metabolize vitamin D, which helps to promote proper skin function. Vitamin D deficiency can also be linked to over 100 diseases (Tanning Truth). Real vitamin D is very important for our bodies.

The UV has been shown to kill T-Cells. The T-cells circulate the body looking for foreign antigens to attack. In the case of psoriasis they attack the body's own skin cells, and end up in the areas they are attacking (National Psoriasis Foundation). That is why psoriasis spots are very red. Exposing the T-Cells to UV rays not only reduces the redness significantly, but also slows down the growth of the scaling skin cells (International Eczema and Psoriasis Foundation) (Pathol 2008) (Pathol 2011).

This is not to say that tanning beds are the a silver bullet treatment or the answer to all of life's problems. There are always risks and concerns with things, and tanning beds are not exempt from that. Tanning beds have a risk of causing potential eye damage (that of course is if you look at the lights without protective eye wear), and links to melanoma. As far as the melanoma connection, there are just as many studies disproving links to UV exposure as there are proving them (Tanning Truth).

Here's the pictures from January 24, 2012. This was after switching my diet and using the topical lotions prescribed by the doctor. This also included taking vitamin D3 every morning orally:

 And here are the pictures from today. This is doing everything I was doing in January plus the tanning salon. I went twice a week for the month of February:

As you can see, there is a marked improvement in the visual appearance of my psoriasis on my hands. I had patches on the inside of both my elbows, a patch on my left shoulder, and some under my right arm. All those patches disappeared during the month of February.

As far as I am concerned, the positives of indoor tanning far outweigh the negatives.