Maple Syrup Marshmallows

In my past life of endless junk food and sugar-filled treats all day long, I was a bit of a marshmallow addict. Ok, I was just a sugar addict. Nothing could compare to the delicious bite(s) of a marshmallow! At first, I was a burn-them black kinda gal, but once I learned of the magic of slow heat… I was super hooked. Over a fire, crispy with just a tad of burnt and super gooey in the middle, I can’t count how many marshmallows (or was it bags of marshmallows…meh, details) I ate as a kid, teen, and first few years as an adult. I just loved marshmallows! If I didn’t have access to a fire, I often remember lighting a candle, sticking a mini marshmallow on a toothpick, or a regular-sized marshmallow on skewers and firing up the sugar. I knew nothing about the toxins in candles back then, cut me some slack.

I would make homemade marshmallows over many years, those were my favorite kinds of marshmallows. When I started learning about holistic and gut health, I thought my marshmallow days were long gone. Homemade marshmallows were made with refined sugar and corn syrup- unhealthy. Store-bought marshmallows were made with corn syrup, sugar, dextrose, Modified food starch, natural and artificial flavoring, tetrasodium pyrophosphate, and even blue food coloring (in the white ones friends, not just the colored). Yuck, this stuff is not food! This is a mixture of highly refined and processed foods and synthetic food additives! I couldn’t go on eating endless marshmallows like I had in the past. I knew one thing for sure- I wouldn’t miss the sugar rush, the shakes I got, and the 24-48 hour stomach ache that came with the sugar load. I was in a sad state indeed, didn’t want to eat garbage food but I also knew the homemade marshmallows my mom and I made were not much better for my health.

This is where the exciting things started to happen- I figured out how to use healthy, whole-food ingredients to replace old foods. I started experimenting with ingredients and eventually made a homemade marshmallow created from honey, coconut sugar, gelatin, and herbal teas. It was a wonderful discovery and to this day they are my favorite homemade marshmallow. You can find this marshmallow in my treats cookbook which I have not uploaded yet, but you can get my main meals cookbook here.

The beauty of life if we seek knowledge, we gain some great information, and I feel like my knowledge about marshmallows has increased over the years. I like to look at foods in hopes that I can get an idea of what nature might be saying when we eat and use them. Here are some examples: Honey is a superfood and helpful in healing many types of sickness and health issues, and nature creates honey in the perfect form. Honey is anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, full of antioxidants, a great skin healer, a super immune booster, and has so many more health benefits. But what happens when we take that superfood and start messing with it? It’s not the same food when we change the chemical structure. Honey can be altered by having things added (such as corn syrup or sugar) or by high heat that causes nutrients to be removed. When we cook honey we are destroying so many of those great health benefits we talked about just a minute ago, so it’s no longer the food nature made it to be. When we consume honey we want to do everything we can to keep it in a raw form. Nature did not make honey to be cooked, nature created honey to be a raw food so we should do our best to eat honey in the form nature created it. I am not saying I don’t cook honey, I still cook honey! But, I am always trying to make foods healthier so that is what I did with these marshmallows!

Have you ever harvested your maple syrup? I did a super fun tree tapping class last year, and from that, I learned how to harvest maple syrup in my yard (well, actually my neighbor’s yard because I don’t have the right trees, thanks neighbor). First, you carefully tap the tree with a special tap made to allow the tree sap to flow through a tube, then you place a bucket under the tap to gather all the sap. There are specific times during the year and other steps you need to consider to tap a tree, but that’s not the point of this post. How much sap flows from the tree depends on the temperature and sun exposure so you may have a quick flow or you may have to hold out for a while before sap comes out. When the sap comes out what color do you think it is? Golden brown like the lovely maple syrup you purchase from the store? Nope, it’s clear and it tastes almost like water. The sap is a great water replacement for water kefir and sourdough stars, a super electrolyte drink, a great plant food AND it turns into maple syrup when cooked! It takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup, it has to be cooked down for many hours at just the right heat. But the fun thing is, it’s still a great food and that is because nature-made maple sap also has the purpose of being cooked into maple syrup. Maple syrup has a lower score on the Glycemic Index, it’s easier to digest compared to refined sugars, and it’s full of minerals, vitamins, amino acids and so much more. Because maple syrup is already a cooked food, I don’t mind cooking it again to make marshmallows!

When we make marshmallows we usually want the sugar mixture to reach 250-265 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius). With these marshmallows, I have found I don’t have to crank up the heat as high. I can still get a good marshmallow at about 230 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe this is because the maple syrup is already cooked down and sticky? The recipe in my cookbook needs the mixture to go a bit higher in temperature, so if you buy my treats book (when I get it online) you may notice that difference. Make sure you get the mixture up to this heat, the higher heat is a big part of how we make sure we get the marshmallow texture. I have not tried these marshmallows over a fire, from my experience they mostly just turn to goo for other natural marshmallows. So, here is my recipe for maple syrup marshmallows! If you make these, please let me know!

How do you like your marshmallows? Does anyone like truly not like marshmallows? I would love to know, please tell me in the comments.