Staghorn Sumac, Harvest in Winter Fruit

I discovered sumac tea about nine years ago. I was visiting a family whose yard was over run with sumac and they had started cutting it down. Whereas the drupes (sumac produces a cluster of densely packed seeds) are usually at the ends of branches high in the air, in this case I was able to easily gather all I wanted at waist height. 

Following recommendations, I broke up the drupes, put the seeds in a large jar, filled it with water, and allowed it to soak over night. 

I was stunned. It was so delicious! and yet I had never known anyone, personally, who had tried it. I vowed to popularize sumac tea, and set about to learn all I could. I began to look for stands) whose owners I could contact and from which I could arrange to collect. This endeavor was surprisingly difficult, but I learned a lot about sumac.

Drupes propped up for visibility (S.Marshall, 2013)

“But isn’t Sumac poisonous?” No Grasshopper, you needn’t worry. There is a poisonous variety of Sumac with berries, which are white, not red. Our variety is called staghorn, produces a seed cluster that is dark red and fuzzy, and has no berries. No subtle discernment is involved, the difference is quite obvious.

Rhizoidal Growth pattern

Sumac, up here in Vermont, grows in two forms, the rhizoid form and the dendritic (tree) form. They seem to have distinct genetics, even though they are known as one species. I cannot prove this, but I suspect an epigenetic adaptive mechanism. In any event, the tree, which provided the seed source of the sumac in that family’s yard, grew to 50 feet. However, when the plant begins to send out roots, and begins to grow new sprouts from the roots, it takes on a form called rhizoidal, a little like a field of grass, except the stems are an inch or more in diameter at the bottom, and spaced a foot or more apart.

There was something else odd about these two forms of sumac. In the vast majority of cases, the rhizoid produced small drupes, about two inches in diameter and 4 to 7 inches in length. Again, the drupes being at the end of the stalk, high in the air, it was difficult to harvest these drupes. In contrast, the drupes produced by the dendritic form were at times three inches in diameter, and would grow to 8 or 10 inches in length. This is why I think there are two genetic forms, but there’s nuance. The rhizoid form of the sumac that were cut down in that yard produced large robust drupes, like the tree nearby. And I have found rhizoid stands with these large drupes. I don’t know that I’ve seen a tree with the small drupes, but the large drupes are definitely delivered by both patterns of growth. I traveled around Addison County Vermont for a couple of years, and at first I wanted the difference in size to be a result of their local conditions. But if this were true, the size of the drupes would vary continuously across the entire range of sizes. But they did not. The variation was bimodal. Hence I wonder if the species has two varieties.

This is important for you when you go to search for sumac drupes to turn into tea. You can search for the large drupes. They are better in other ways.

There is an insect, or perhaps a mite (it is very small, and I have not taken it to a lab), which feeds on the sap of the sumac plant and favors the warm safe enclosure of the drupe (I’m inferring). They tend to favor the small drupes. Or perhaps the small size is a result of the loss of plant energy to the arthropod. This bug also explains some of the popular aversion to sumac tea. One Vermonter I spoke with told me his family didn’t like sumac because it had all of that insect detritus in it. This is a significant barrier. It is possible to produce good tea with these drupes, but the thought of it is disgusting. But again, there are strategies to over come this obstacle, which I will review when I tell you about making tea. It’s important to realize that not all drupes are infested with this bug. They have to disperse, and presumably when sumac colonizes new soil (they are a pioneer species), they do not have the bugs, and if you find them, you will have sumac in its pristine form. On the other hand, my experience is that the larger drupes tend not to be infested so often. So that is what I look for when I want sumac!

Sumac Drupes high in the air

There is another very significant factor in the collection of sumac. The species is called “staghorn” for a reason. The drupe stands tall at the very end of the branch on which it grows, or perhaps near the end of the branch. If you have found a tree, you will wonder how to collect the drupes without cutting down the tree. If you have a yard and your own sumac, you can cut it down to chest height, to collect the drupes, because they will grow back, and next year the drupes won’t be out of reach. I have tried cutters on the end of a pole, which was very expensive of my time. The best thing might be a ladder, though I have not had one to use. On this point, it is up to your ingenuity.

Staghorn sumac has a unique ecological niche, which explains some of its superb qualities. One year I began watching the growth and development of drupes from their first appearances in the spring. The flowers were a pale green (it doesn’t want any attention at this point), and gradually grew pink over the summer and red late in the autumn. But ripening did not follow the usual pattern of a fruit that ripens in the fall and is ready to be eaten. Sumac is still not ripe in November, when it is still green inside of the drupe. It’s essentially ready late in December, but the best time to harvest is late in the winter.

What is the point of this? Sumac’s unique strategy is to provide an over-winter food to birds. A berry would not be suitable to this strategy, because berries have water in them, which would be frozen and suck heat out of the target customer, the over-wintering birds. Instead, the seeds are produced with a fuzz which is suffused with this plant’s unique formulation of nutrients. And in this form, it lasts all winter. Indeed, drupes can be found which, sheltered from rain, are two and three years old, and still suitable for making tea. I recently made tea with drupes that I have kept in my closet for three years. It had no mold, and had lost only some of its flavor.

This is the reason for sumac’s amazing properties. A plant whose strategy for propagation is to feed birds over winter must formulate it’s nutrient offering to persist over a significant period of time. Hence, it is hypothesized that the staghorn sumac contains a rich variety of anti-oxidants, starches, and other substances, which preserve the fruit, and do not age or grow stale (the sparse literature is ambiguous about the nutritional contents of the suffuse). Sumac may be the only fruit engineered by nature to persist as a viable food across such a span of time. (Grains and beans are easily preserved for this length of time, but nature did not engineer them to be viable as food for this span of time.) The current attention to antioxidants gives sumac a special nutritional value. It may be the richest source of antioxidants in nature. I can’t prove that.

Collecting sumac can be impossible if you try to do it with leaves on the plant. Since it remains fresh all winter, the best time to collect it would be a warm day in January or February, but definitely before the leaves come out.

Some people worry about the nutrient broth being washed away by rain, and if you find drupes from the previous year, the exposed portions of the drupe will have been rinsed by rain to a point where the drupe turns grey. But this fruit is engineered (by nature, through natural selection) to provide a tasty treat to the birds who might stop by for a meal, all winter long! I don’t worry about rain damaging the drupes before I collect them in their first year. The prize is a large drupe without the detritus of arthropods. If a little rain has fallen on them, they are still abundant with nutrients. Here is a piece done by Vermont Public Radio, with some great photos: foraging-vermonts-surprisingly-scrumptuous-sumac.

So you found some Sumac to harvest, and you have at least three large drupes. I get a big pot (two or three gallons), add a gallon or two of water, and heat it to 150 degrees (use a thermometer). I do not have the science to prove this is the best protocol, but it works great for me. (If you want to experiment, bear in mind that you want the nutrients to dissolve in the water, not get cooked, and high temperatures will cook them.) Now, you could just add the entire drupes to the hot water, but I use another method, described below. Using a porous fabric (my favorite I stripped from a large hi-fi speaker) to hold the drupes, I dunk them until the water turns a dark red, in about a minute, and then I remove the drupes. I now have sumac tea.

An option, which I prefer because I want to unpack the seeds and expose every side of them to water, is to break up the drupe. This can be done by hand, which is work and will make your hands stronger, but I prefer a piece of hardware cloth or kitchen bread rack with 3/8 or ½ inch pitch, which provides an easy way to break up the drupe. Like grating a carrot the long way, I scrape the drupe on the wire mesh, against the direction of the stems, and the seeds quickly fall through. I use a large rectangular cake pan to catch the seeds. However you do this, be watching for the detritus of the arthropod inside the drupe. An advantage of breaking up the drupe in this way is that as soon as you see the brown stuff exposed, you can stop grating, leaving the detritus attached to the stem for convenient disposal!

But suppose you weren’t so lucky and you could only collect some of the smaller drupes. You will find some that are free of bugs but frequently are not. You have two strategies. Use a screen, to separate the seeds from their stem, which allows you to collect seeds without disturbing the bug stuff inside. Or, you could dunk entire drupes in the hot water. The seeds are so densely packed that there is typically no danger of the bug stuff inside coming in contact with the water before you are finished steeping your drupe. But you must be careful. I don’t think there is any actual danger from this stuff, but it’s gross. And if you wanted to make tea for sale, you would have to answer questions from food safety people. So consider your goals and the condition of the drupes, use your judgment, consider the preferences of your consumers, and do what feels right to you.

If you wanted to propagate sumac, you could find some plants that you like and transplant them. They are pioneers and will grow easily in disturbed soil. I don’t know, but it is possible that all you need is a few pieces of root. If you have the idea that you want to grow from seeds, you want to consider this: it may be necessary for seeds to be digested by birds to activate them. I was once offered hundreds of seedlings – which were growing in a pile of pigeon poo. I couldn’t use them, but I was intrigued by the idea that the seeds, produced by a plant that uses a strategy of attracting birds in winter to disperse its seeds, need to be digested by the birds, in the same way that some plants will only grow after a fire. Maybe someday I will be able to experiment.

That’s my accumulated wisdom on the subject of Staghorn Sumac. Oh, one more thing. I always thought the flavor would be great to add to other beverages, beer for example. A month ago, I made a batch and added a kombucha starter. Do you want to know what was better than Sumac tea?

Sumac is known in the literature to have huge tannin levels in the bark, and sumac tea that is steeped for too long will acquire the bitter, sickening flavor of tannin. That is why we only steep for a minute, two at most. Meanwhile, why do they say that Kombucha cannot be made with herbal tea, but must be made with Camellia sinensis teas? Sumac, apparently an “herbal” tea, may have some of the secret mojo needed to make Kombucha, and that mojo may be tannic acid. Any food chemists who want to look into this? If you want to make Sumac Kombucha, add some sugar (all Kombucha requires this), let your tea cool to room temperature, add the starter, and let it ferment for a month. Get the details by reading about how to make Kombucha.

So experiment. There is information out there and you can look it up. One article I found very informative was from the Pakistan Journal of Nutrition, 2009, called Comparative Study on the Chemical Composition of Syrian Sumac and Chinese Sumac, by Kossah, Nsabimana, Zhao, Chen, et al. Sumac isn’t an easy fruit to harvest and use, but it is highly rewarding.