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Talking Trees with Davey Tree
Food from Trees! - Pies, Syrups, Liqueur and More
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Lou Meyer, arborist and business developer from Davey's Mid-Atlantic region, talks about unique foods to eat from trees, including maple cream pie, different kinds of syrups, Korean treats, Italian liqueur and more.
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Welcome to the Deby Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oester. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees Podcast, we know trees are the answer. Well, folks, we have a very special podcast for you today. I'm sitting with Lou Meyer, who is an arborist from the Baltimore area. And we're sitting in the Baltimore Convention Center looking out at the beautiful city. Once a year, Lou and I get together here in Baltimore for the Mid-Atlantic Nursery Trade Show. And Lou, we've been wanting to do this topic for a long time.
SPEAKER_00We've been talking about it for years, and we're finally here talking about our interesting edible products from trees. So a lot of you know, you know, the simple stuff. Maple syrup comes from maple trees, apples come from apple trees, but we were looking for ones that are a little more outside the range of normality.
SPEAKER_01And this came up when you I don't know what we were talking about when we did a podcast, but you mentioned this very unique
Maple cream pie
SPEAKER_01pie, which I'm looking at a piece of this very unique pie staring me in the face, and it's in the morning and I'm hungry.
SPEAKER_00Yes, it's the maple cream pie. So this has been a favorite of mine for years. One of my best buddies lives up in Burlington, and we used to visit him, and we would stop into the diners, and they all carried maple cream pie. And uh I successfully convinced my delightful mother-in-law to uh make it a few years ago, and it's been a hit. And so for my birthday every year, she makes me a maple cream pie, and throughout the year we get them from time to time. And uh yeah, I thought it'd be a good one to lead off today because of its just sweet nature. So, how do they make it? Yeah, well, it's it's a it's basically a custard pie, but you mix in maple uh syrup with it. Has to be maple syrup, you can't use just regular pancake syrup because the sugars don't work the same way. Um, could be any different grade of maple syrup, and I know that my mother-in-law, uh Ginny, has experimented with different grades, and they all come out about the same, some a little sweeter than others. This is a dark grade that we're uh sampling today, which has a little less sweetness to it. Um you really can't tell too much of a difference, but if you're uh if you're a fan favorite, you do.
SPEAKER_01Well, since you already know what it tastes like, why do you have a piece of pie? Well, I can't pass up the opportunity, my friend. All right, I'm giving it a try. Let's take a bite and see. Oh my. That is amazing. Isn't it though? Oh my. I can't wait till we're done and I can finish that piece of pie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no doubt. So, yeah, I mean it's a custard pie. Um, think about pecan pie without the pecans, uh, which is a chest pie, uh, but just with that maple mixed in.
SPEAKER_01And the texture is so smooth, yeah, and you get that aftertaste of the maple syrup, the real maple syrup, right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and it's it's kind of a light flavor, so it's not like drinking maple syrup, um, which I've been known to do. I do like maple syrup, but um, but no, this is uh the secondary. Um I would like to say it's not a difficult pie to make, but I don't know because I've never made one. Um, but again, coming from my mother-in-law, it's not a wildly difficult one. Um just straight up goodness. And killer, you know, in the fall, in the spring, as you know, sugaring seasons the spring. So the maple, uh, you're tapping in February, March up in Vermont, and then by the time you're you're sugaring, you're done in uh March-April. So it's a good spring pie, but because of its maple flavor, it's a fall favorite also.
SPEAKER_01And I'd never heard of it before, and that's how many years have we been talking about this? And this is at least two years since we wanted to do this. And oh so exciting. Well, speaking of syrups, it's just not maple trees, right?
SPEAKER_00Right,
Walnut syrup
SPEAKER_00no, you could you could pull syrups from all pla signs, yeah, from all kinds of places. Um my favorite syrup that I've ever had was actually walnut syrup. I was at a sugaring event where they they pulled sap from walnuts. So all trees have sap in them. That's part of being a tree. And uh it just so happens that sugar maples have the highest sugar content in their sap. So it the sap the the the syrup that comes through it tastes really good. It's also more efficient because it takes less to m make the syrup. So for instance, a sugar maple. Sorry, yeah, a sugar maple, you need about a hundred gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. So if you're thinking of the thousands and thousands of gallons of maple syrup that's out there, those are tens of thousands, if not millions of gallons of sap from the maple trees. Other species require more gallons of sap to make a gallon of syrup. So just economically in efficiency, it doesn't make sense.
SPEAKER_01So for the walnut stuff, is it the same sort of thing though? Is it the same time of the year?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, same time of the year you're tapping in the in the um late winter, early spring, uh, when the most of the fluids are are traveling from the roots up into the the leaves. Actually, it's coming back down, it's the sugars of the trees that are making. So it's the sh it's the sap that's just moving around inside the tree that's full of sugars.
SPEAKER_01And like for walnut, does it have a completely different taste or is that?
SPEAKER_00Completely, uh, but it is different. You you would taste it and go, this is not maple syrup. But um I I thought it had a more nuttier taste. I mean, walnut's a nut tree, so it just seems to have a nuttier taste to me. Um it was lighter in color, uh, but you can make it, yeah, from pretty much any tree. Have you ever seen it like in the store or anything? Or is there a place? No, I haven't seen any stores, but I know you can find them online, I'm sure. There's you can find anything online. Um so yeah, yeah. We we did it, it was at a sugaring event, so we were at a local park here in Baltimore uh in late no uh sorry, late January, I think it was late February, a few years ago, and uh we they were making maple syrup, they were boiling maple syrup. They had other syrups to compare and contrast.
SPEAKER_01So that's really cool. Yeah, it is cool. Are there any other ones that are popular
Spruce and pine tip syrup
SPEAKER_01besides maple and walnut?
SPEAKER_00None that I could think of, but one I was I was looking at some uh ideas for this podcast. One that came up was syrup that's made from spruce tips or pine tips. Now, spruce tips or pine tips are the new growth in the spring. You cannot use old growth, it'll turn out disgusting. But those new uh kind of softer, lighter green color spruce tips. They're really powerful in their aroma. Yeah, absolutely. So you can you can clip those off, put them into a jar, a sealable jar, gotta be a tight seal, uh, with brown sugar. So you mix about half and half, half brown sugar, half spruce tips, or pine tips. I'm a spruce fan, so I'd go that way. Um, put in that jar, you don't add any liquids at all, and seal it up. And over time, that sugar will pull the moisture out of the spruces and it'll turn into a bit of a slurry almost. And a syrup. So it's syrupy, it's thick. And then after uh a couple months, you can pour that through a filter, and what comes out is the syrup. So you can do that. And then from there you can do all sorts of fun things. Use it for baking, you could use it for pancakes, um, you can mix it into cocktails, kind of like a um uh simple syrup. Which actually leads me to another one. You can make simple syrup from spruce or pine tips, kind of the same way that you make simple syrups for cocktails. So um, you know, two cups of water, two cups of sugar, you boil those until the sugar dissolves. That's a simple syrup. You got that. Um for spruce tip or pine tip simple syrup, you take that um, you uh as soon as it stops as soon as the sugar dissolves, throw those spruce tips or pine tips into that mixture when it's hot, turn the heat off so it's no longer boiling, and cover it, and let that sit for about 24 hours, and then strain that into a uh a jar or a craft or whatever. I would suggest putting a couple drops of lemon juice in at that point for um for preservation. So it's that that uh acidic acid, and then you've got spruce or pine uh simple syrup that you could use in your cocktails, which is kind of cool.
SPEAKER_01So last Christmas my neighbor came up and gave me a six-pack of beer, and one of them was some kind of spruce beer. Oh, yeah. It tasted like I was chewing on a spruce tip, it was that powerful. I mean, I couldn't drink it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, there are some spruce tip IPAs and pine IPAs that are out there, and I go nuts over them. I imagine a lot of my fellow arborists tend to gravitate towards those also. Um they can be overpowering.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, to me, I might as well just go out to the tree and start nibbling at it.
SPEAKER_00Ah, like Bambi. He'd be great. He'd be great.
Nocino
SPEAKER_00Um speaking of those, we can uh one of the other products that we're gonna talk about today is an Italian liqueur named Noccino. And I happen to bring some samples here as well. So um this particular sample is from Forteve Spirits, which is in Brooklyn, New York. Now, Noccino is traditionally an Italian liqueur that's made from walnuts that are soaked in spirits, and it's typically vodka that they use. Um so what they do is they pick unripe, unripe walnuts in the springtime, right around uh the solstice. So traditionally it's on St. John's Tide, which is June 24th, which is a holiday in Italy, um, and that's the the picking time. So that's right around the solstice of the 21st or 22nd of June, I can't remember. Um, anyways, you pull these unripe green walnuts, you leave them in the husk, and you put them into a container, um, again, a jar or like a vodka? Well, yeah, well then you pour vodka over it. Yeah, see, yeah. So you you put it into like a um uh what do you call it, a pitcher, and then you put the vodka in it, and then you let that soak for a couple of months. So how would what would you say that smell is? What it's it's not really an alcohol smell. No, it's just sweet. How did you find out about this? How did how from the neutino. Oh, interestingly, my brother-in-law, Dan, back in Cincinnati, makes this. So he goes out um in June and he he grabs the walnuts in the neighborhood, soaks them, and then you add spices. That's the other thing, too. It's not just the walnuts and the the alcohol, the the li the the spirits, although it could be, but the real way to do it is to add sugars and herbs and spices, um, you know, things like rosemary would go great with it, or uh also spruce tips, you do spruce tips with it. Tell me about the first time you had it. So it was Christmas time, so that's the thing, is it usually it it's done right around uh Advent, and you drink it during Advent. And so yeah, Dan had this bottle of stuff on his that he pulled out around Thanksgiving, because we go back to Cincy for Thanksgiving, and he said, Hey, I want you to try this. And uh absolutely loved it. Just great. I I sipped it straight, uh, no rocks, nothing, and that's how I enjoyed it. But you can do however you want.
SPEAKER_01I mean, would people do it as a shot or would they most but more of a sipper? More of a sipper, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean you could shoot it, it's low in alcohol. Um, it's not a high ABV.
SPEAKER_01Uh well while we're recording, it's 11 30 in the morning, and ironically, the last time that I had something like this this early in the day, yeah, was when I was in Italy visiting my uh my wife's family, yeah, and they were mixing martinis at like 11 in the morning, and then also I said no martinis, they offered me wine, and I declined, and that was a mistake. Uh huh. I just started looking in their face and said, No, no, no, yes, uh I'll have some wine. So, all right, let's give it a taste. Cheers, buddy. Cheers. Uh salute. Mmm. Wow. Yeah. That's that's got a really strong flavor. The alcohol part of it isn't that bad. I mean, it hits you, but it's not like drinking like a shot of like tequila or something like that. I mean, it's not choking you or anything. It's almost like an amaretto. It's smooth. Yeah, it's smooth. Yeah. Interesting. Smooth like like an amaretto or a or any of those liqueurs. I think the next uh ten interviews I have to do here at Matt's are going to be interesting.
SPEAKER_00Right, yeah. Well, I got the whole bottle, you know, back later. Uh but yeah, no, it's a great um, you know, it's kind of fun. You can make it yourself. Uh you can buy it in stores. Like I said, this one's store-bought.
SPEAKER_01Um I think it's cool that uh you can make it yourself. That's really interesting.
SPEAKER_00And again, you know, different villages and families have their own traditions of what they mix in with it. So one might have a citric flavor, one might have a, like I said, a rosemary flavor. Oh man, that's cool. And it's regional. Uh the the and I said it's from Italy, but according to, and this is I got off the internet, according to Roman historians, Nicino was actually born in Great Britain, and the earliest records of it uh were were from the Romans uh with strange traditions of these people who on June 24th, when they drank a very special brew and they said they could talk with goblins, elves, and goddesses. These are really gonna be good interviews. These are really good interviews. I think we need a little more chino than this to get there, but but it is cool. So, yeah, good little tradition from uh from Italy and from my my brother-in-law Dan.
SPEAKER_01Just seems like a fun project. If you had a walnut tree, that's just such a fun project. And then especially if you had an Italian heritage, you could add this to your Feast of Seven Fishes or whatever your traditions might be. Oh, yeah. That's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you really could. You really could. I'm having another sip. Absolutely. Next on our
Dotori-musk
SPEAKER_00list of uh of products is actually another international one, like No Chino. Um, so we are now sitting in Baltimore, Maryland, recording this, just west of Baltimore, about 10 miles is where I live, in Ellicott City, Maryland, which is in Howard County. Ellicate City has one of the highest concentrations of Koreans in the United States of America. All my buddies are Korean, all my kids' friends are Korean, so I've gotten really involved in the culture, and I absolutely love it. And they take me out for lunch sometimes, uh, my Korean friends, and we order all sorts of great stuff, bulgogi and uh and all the all the good stuff. But as I'm gonna stop you right there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Next year when I come to Mance. Yeah, we've got to explore some Korean food. Absolutely. Absolutely. That sounds amazing. Go ahead.
SPEAKER_00It's it's such a unique uh uh cuisine and it's delicious. But uh but the so when you order though, you get a plate of generally just the meat and the rice. Uh now they do a lot of stews and other things, but if you just get bulgogi or if you get other meats, you know, chicken, um, it's the meat and the rice. And then they bring out this whole slew of side plates, probably about six of them. Uh and you have a couple of different um, what's the fermented cabbage, the kimchi and uh some other things. They're called bonchon. It's what the side dishes are called, bon chan. And one of them is a dish called Dotori muk. D-O-T-O-R-I is the first word, and then muk M-U-K is the second word. And what it is is an acorn jelly. Now, I was gonna bring a sample uh for this that doesn't travel well. Uh so we're not.
SPEAKER_01And you were saying something that hardens or something.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it hardens up pretty quick. Uh but it's interesting because you you know, everyone always wants to know if we can eat acorns. They say, I see the squirrels eating acorns. People ask me as an arborist all the time if you could eat acorns. Physically, you can, but you're gonna get sick. And what you're gonna get sick from is the tannins. And so if you're a red wine fan, you know that grapes have tannins in them also, and that's what gives people headaches sometimes after red wine. With acorns, they've got a high level of tannins and another product called a polyphenol, um, and both of those are not digestible in high amounts. Now, Native Americans would make uh acorn flour, and what they would do is they would leach the acorns, they would leach the tannins out by putting the acorns, they'd crush them up, put them into a cloth or a sack, and they'd put it in a creek or a river and leave it in for a couple of days. And what was happening was that water was drawing out the tannins as it as it washed away. Well, what they do in in uh Korea for the detoure muk is they they open up the acorns, they take the husk off, so they got the the meat inside. So the you know the acorn shell that you see is not what you eat.
SPEAKER_01But it hasn't been, what did you say, the uh hasn't been leached yet. Okay, so no leaching yet.
SPEAKER_00No leaching yet. So they they take the shell off, the the acorn part that you see, they take the the the meat, what they call it, the meat of the nut out, and then they grind that into a paste. Well, they take the paste and they stir it into water. They got a big vat of water that they're stirring this paste into. And the water's boiling, and I think it's boiling. Yeah, I would think it's at least it's warm. And while they're doing that, they're stirring it and they're sieving it, and then as they do that, the uh starch settles to the bottom of these vats. And you take the water out, and what you got is this uh starchy paste at the bottom of the vat that has been leached all the tannins out. You pulverize that into powder, and then what you do is you mix that powder with water again uh to turn into like a jelly, and that's what your side dish is. So what you buy is the acorn powder from the store. You mix that with water and you turn it into this jelly called detouri muk. Um how would you characterize the flavor? Well, you you nutty? It is nutty, yeah, it is nutty. You mix it a lot, so it's it uh oftentimes you'll have soy over it, um it's like soy sauce, um, slivered carrots or scallions, a lot of times it's mixed with garlic, also. So you never get the just straight taste of the jelly, but it is it's slightly nutty. Um it's it's sweet or no, it's fairly tasteless, to be honest with you. Uh it doesn't have a whole lot of flavor to it. It's the stuff that you mix with it, but yeah, you can taste a little bit of the savoriness of it. Um so yeah, that's the notory muk. Um one of the cool stories behind this is uh, you know, Korea has been in its history in a number of uh conflicts with other countries, and during the first invasion of Korea by Japan in the Josun dynasty, uh the king at that time, a king named Sunjo, uh took refuge in the north. He had to leave the capital at that time and took refuge in the north. And due to the food shortages, the food storage that were due to the invasion uh made it difficult for the villagers to find something to serve the king and his entourage. And so they hurriedly made him this de Tori muk. They put it together for him. And after he returned to the palace, and at that time he had never had it, but at that time, uh afterwards, King Sunju, he often ate the datori muk as a sign of uh uh solidity, solidity, yeah, solidarity with his people, uh, and to show that they would not forget the uh the favoritism that they showed him and helped him out. So I always like this, you know, it's like a folk story, but a story. So uh that's the de Tori muk. Otherwise, you know, other products that we can think of. We
Pawpaw treats
SPEAKER_00talked about the uh maple cream pie, you know, pecan pie is another one that is much like uh maple cream pie. And I imagine, think about this right now, Doug, if we made a maple cream pie and mixed in pecans, that might be pretty spectacular, too. Something the old noggin for next year. Uh we frequently talk about pawpaws on the show. Um and yes, you can eat the pawpaws, but there's lots of cool stuff that you can make with them. Uh I know back in Ohio, uh in Jackson, Ohio, in Southeast Ohio, they've got the pawpaw festival every year. And there's probably pawpaw festivals all around the country, but down there you could get pawpaw beer, pawpaw wine, they put it on pizzas, pawpaw ice cream. Pawpaw ice cream, absolutely. I love pawpaw ice cream. So lots of cool things you do there. Now, I I have had a pawpaw cider once, and it was one of the worst things I've ever had in my life. Just straight sweetness.
SPEAKER_01It was well last year I've got a friend, she doesn't like pawpaws, but she has a nice patch of pawpaw trees that really fruit well. She sent me an email, like, I you gotta get rid of these. And I just did a pop-up event at a local place right down the street from me, and I said, put it on social media. Anybody that wants to come and taste what a pawpaw is, come. And like 111 people came and they were just blown away by it because I write about it so often, we talk about it a lot on the on the podcast, and people are just intrigued by it. You know, native fruit, and uh it doesn't ship, it it it it can't be picked early. Right. Uh so it's it's more you'll see it maybe sometimes in farmers' markets, but mostly it's just home gardeners.
SPEAKER_00My neighbors down the street have a tree that's a cultivar that is prolific in fruiting. I mean the the tree is almost falling over in the fall because of the number of fruit, and they don't eat it. And they said, take whatever you want. So we go down there, I like it chilled. When it's warm, I think it's okay. When it's chilled, I think it's excellent.
SPEAKER_01So the folklore is, and there's no actual writings about that, it says that George Washington loved Pawpaw's chilled. Yeah. Now, how did you get things chilled in 17 whatever, 80 something? People tell me that they would in the winter cut the ice out of the lake and put it in an ice house, which is a big barn and everything, and that's how they chilled things. Whether that's true or not, but I I love to to tell that story. But there is some you know really great writing about pawpaws, and one of them is the uh Lewis and Clark. Yes, they had to subsist on uh pawpaws one September, and and the quote is uh because uh game. Was scarce and biscuits were running low. And two people got sick. Oh, really? Yeah, because some people, when they eat a pawpaw, it doesn't agree with them, especially the skin. Right. Yeah, yeah. I I think is it part of the nightshade family? Is that why? Maybe, yeah, I don't know. But I just know that in the past, 95% of the people love it. But there is a lot of people will tell me like, uh, it didn't agree with me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that does happen. Uh, but no, lots of good things you could do with it. The last thing I want to talk about today
Guacamole
SPEAKER_00is a product that a lot of folks love. Um, it's not native to the United States, and you you really can't grow it here, but we eat the heck out of it. It's guacamole. So guacamole is a you know uh uh staple dish for uh Mexican cuisine and Latin American cuisine, um, and I happen to adore it, so I figured why not talk about it? You know, the avocado tree is an evergreen tree. So it's an evergreen tree that grows 30 to 60 feet tall. So it's a big tree, um, diameter of one to two feet. I mean, I think and uh yeah, they take the avocado, it's super simple. You yeah, once it ripens, you open it. There's a stone inside or a pit that you take out, and the uh light green flesh of it, you smash that in with lime juice, cilantro, onions, jalapenos. You can put other stuff in there too, but that's really the basic blend. And uh and go to town with some chips or on you know, use it as a garnish on uh quesadilla or whatever you want. And you know, my wife, Molly, loves putting it on toast to make avocado toast. Uh interestingly, National Guacamole Day is September 16th. I always like to throw those things out there. So uh, you know, Americans have adopted it as one of their favorite garnishes.
SPEAKER_01Well, I turned my young grand granddaughter on to uh avocado toast, and we have a song. Yeah, and it just says avocado toast. Whenever I get it, I said, let's do our song, and she's five and she sings a song. It it's it's fun. And the other fun thing about avocados is they'll you'll put them in the compost and you'll get a little tree. Yeah. You know, it it it won't put avocados on, obviously, in our climate. Right. But it's a fun little tree to grow for the summer. Oh, it absolutely is. Well, Lou, wasn't it fun to be face to face to do a podcast? It was uh here in Baltimore. We're gonna do one more from here. Uh so I appreciate everything. That was a lot of fun. Uh, what is this stuff called again? No chino. No more nochino for me, but I'm gonna finish this piece of pie before we record anything else. I'm so delighted you got a chance to try the maple cream pie. Great to see you. All right, you too, buddy. Lou and I always have fun, and boy, it was great to see him in person. Now, tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees Podcast from the Davy Tree Expert Company. I'm your host, Doug Oster, and as always, we'd love for you to subscribe to the podcast if you would like to reach us. Got some questions, got some ideas, two ways to do it. Send an email to podcast at Davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-S at the A V E Y dot com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. Your ideas can be on a future show. We'd love to hear from you. As always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast trees are the answer.