Spritz or Candy Up Your Spruce Tips

Candided spruce tips in birch syrup will be a treat for Suzanne’s kids. Photo by Suzanne Crocker
Spruce tips will become one of Suzanne and family’s candy during their year of eating local. Miche Genest has a wonderful recipe for making Candied Spruce Tips using homemade Spruce Tip Syrup in The Boreal Feast, A Culinary Journey Through the North by Harbour Publishing. And Miche has generously allowed us to share her recipe. However, Suzanne probably will not have access to sugar to make the syrup, so Suzanne has adapted Miche’s recipe and combined coniferous with deciduous trees to make Candied Spruce Tips in Birch Syrup. They are more ‘birchy’ than the original recipe, but still quite delicious. (And, according to 11-year-old Tess, addictive!) Before you worry about using precious birch syrup to candy spruce tips, remember, you can keep re-using the birch syrup for batch after batch. The birch syrup gradually takes on a more sprucey taste with every batch. > See the original and modified recipes for Candied Spruce Tips Leigh Joseph and Suzanne Crocker enjoy Spruce Tip Spritzers.
Spruce tips and birch syrup also go beautifully together in a harmony of coniferous with deciduous in a drink idea inspired by ethnobotanist, Leigh Joseph.  Check out Leigh Joseph’s recipe for Spruce Tip Spritzer.

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