Fir (and Pine) Mugolio – Biblical Natural Health Coaching

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jars of fir mugolio — Fir mugolio at an earlier stage

Two days after the first jar’s July 30th check date, and 14 days before the other three jar’s check date, I decided to finish the fir mugolio. My reason for doing so is that the sugar slush appeared to be solidified across the bottom of the jars, and there was no further burping to be had, suggesting our Okanagan summer heat had sped things up. Lots of liquid though, so I brought them into the house.

I pulled down my usual dinner pot to dump everything into, when I realized two things:

First, yes indeed, there were hard sugar layers in all four of the jars, so I pulled out the soup pot, put the jars in that and dumped hot water into it to melt the sugar and loosen it from the jars.

Second, the dinner pot was nowhere near big enough for this batch! Once all the jars were finally free of their sugar, I dumped out the water, and dumped the over-full dinner pot into the soup pot and put that on the stove for the second step.

This was when I realized that some of the cones were still green. Not all of them had been fully leeched into the sugar, so cutting the fermentation process short due to melted/hardened sugar patties meant I didn’t get the full amount of liquid out of some of the cones. Many cones were properly brown, but a number weren’t. I probably should have left them for at least another week, maybe to the full 30 day count for the bulk of the jars.

I set the pot to medium heat, put a lid on, and stirred occasionally. Due to the green cones, I let it sit there simmering for awhile then set up my hanging cheesecloth apparatus over a large bowl and drained them. This is the result. Three 368ml former tostito sauce jars of Fir Mugolio!

The house smelled quite strongly of citrus/conifer while I was doing this, and the flavour of the syrup is quite nice!

We found a closed pine cone within human-reachable height of a pine tree, so I have a small jar of that now fermenting outside. Temperatures cooled a bit over the past week, and a cloudy day allowed me to look up into the branches of Miss Fir, and I discovered she indeed does have green cones after all, just nowhere near where we can get at them. Another fir across a field is loaded in green cones too, so I’m tempted to run over (on the same property, no worries for permission), fill a bucket and do up another set of jars, this time going the full 30 days to ensure all cones turn brown.

EDIT August 30th, 2024

The small jar of pine mugolio had me worried for awhile as it was fermenting, due to a very strong alcoholic smell that it was giving off. I don’t drink, and can’t stand the smell of alcohol, particularly that of beer or wine or strong spirits! I was telling the landlord the other day that I hoped that smell would disappear during the cooking phase on the stove, which was due to happen today. I softened the sugar sludge in a bit of hot water, then scraped it out of the jar into a small pot. Amazingly enough, I did not detect any smell while doing that step. When the sugar had dissolved, I accidentally let it get to a boil (the chef doesn’t do this for fear of crystalization, so he only recommends melting and no further heating), took it off the heat, grabbed a strainer and funnel, and poured it into a decorative maple syrup glass jar that we were keeping. To my surprise, the syrup tasted quite nice, no alcoholic smell or flavour, and the quarter of the tostito jar worth of sugar sludge melted into enough volume to fill this maple leaf-shaped jar most of the way full! I have a quart jar of pine mugolio that will be ready on the 15th of September. The fir jars will all be ready on the 8th, and then a set of quart jars of pine mugolio will be ready by the 25th of September.

We won’t be buying syrup for a LONG time!

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EDIT September 8th, 2024

As hinted at in the last update, I DID run over to the other fir tree and gather enough cones to fill 13 jars! Those were started on August 26th, and finished today.

I was expecting to need at least 15 368ml tostito jars, but was having issues holding them due to drowning in chokecherries and having to turn them into syrups, as well as making more hawthorn syrup for my son. We ended up buying a flat of 500ml mason jars, and found two more 250ml jars. I ended up hot soaking 2 tostito jars, two 250ml jars and the flat of 500ml’s.

Emptying the jars was an adventure! The soaking of each jar’s base helped, but eventually there was one jar where I broke it getting the final few cones out of the bottom of the jar. I was immediately glad that I was using my double-cheese (curtain sheer) cloth setup for straining the syrup, because I found a bit of glass on the top of a cone while they drained into the bowl.

Once I got all the jars emptied, and the syrup largely melted off the cones, I put the syrup back into the pot to finish melting the sugar further, not quite bringing it to a boil as per the chef’s directions. I ended up pouring into 8 jars, for a total of 3.236 litres of fir mugolio. That works out to almost 1 cup of syrup per jar or 12.94 cups of syrup at the 250ml measurement.

I was able to put 8 500ml jars away, which will probably get used for more chokecherry syrup as we had to do another run for leaf. The leaf tub for Ashtree Wildcrafting should ideally be full once the last two sets of trays are crushed into it. The current set is due for crushing, then the next set will be laid out as I get those berries into the crockpot. It will be nice to have that task done before October this year.

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The original recipe writer doesn’t use plain white sugar for his mugolio, for no other reason than he likes the colour given by using brown or demerrera instead. But the plain sugar used in my photo here, still came out a nice caramel colour.

Why buy your pancake syrup when you can make it?! Fermented pancake syrup at that?! I’ll be doing more of this!

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