THE FARMSTEAD | How To Harvest & Eat RAW Sugarcane

How's it going everybody? Sean Pili here with The Farmstead and today we are at the Gold Farm Hawaii campus on the east side of the Big Island. They have an amazing piece of property here and an awesome beginning farmer training program. So today we're going to be showing you folks how to harvest and process Hawaiian sugar cane. Let's check it out. So first step is finding the right stock to cut and these are all in different stages. As you can see here this little guy we got a little cakey offshoot coming out. A little baby plant you know definitely don't want to cut this one. This is going to be a little while until it's ready and we want to look at the nodes. These little knuckles here are called the nodes and the in between is the inner node and we want it nice and thick and long. So this guy here looks still a little skinny and a little younger. This guy here looks nice and thick but it's still a pretty young plant so I'm going to let them grow a bit longer. But this guy right here looks about right. So this is the black sugar cane. It's a Hawaiian variety. There's over five dozen different Hawaiian varieties and this one is one of my favorites. A lot softer meat, a lot sweeter and yeah this guy looks pretty good. So now that we located the one that we want we're going to cut this guy pretty low. I like to go as low as I can. Nice strike right at the bottom here. Sweet. So if you want to come and take a look I'll point out a few things here. You see these little guys? These are little buds. They're coming out of the nodes. These little knuckles here and that is going to eventually turn into a branch which will eventually turn into another little tree. So what we're going to do is we're going to take whatever we want and some of the taller pieces you know we can plant we can cut these in pieces lay them down horizontally and eventually these will grow into another sugar cane plant. So next step I'm going to cut this you know maybe three feet just enough for me to work with. And then from here we're going to skin it you know I'm not using any major tools just a machete and we're not going to run this through a juicer we're just going to skin it we'll cut it into little carrot sticks and just eat it from there you know we'll try to keep it as raw and easy as possible. So the buds are growing up when I skin it I want to skin it in the opposite direction so I'm going against the grain here normally I'd want a bigger machete I prefer the one with the bigger head here it's just more weight but I've got this little guy here so what I'm going to do right at the bud there or at the node chop it in I'm just going to skin this guy all the way down. All right so I don't like to skin the whole thing because I like a little bit of stuff to work with here so I'm not grabbing onto the raw sugar cane but next step is to cut each section off of the node or the knuckle. Got a little wooden cutting board here I'm going to start by cutting off all the dirty stuff all right cut this next guy off that's good enough for now. Okay so I've cut all the knuckles off the edge and now this is the piece that we're going to keep and the piece that we're going to eat. Cut this guy down the middle and then I'm going to make little carrot sticks. All right there we go got some little sugar cane sticks here you don't want to swallow the whole thing you're going to use your back teeth you're going to bite on it suck out all the juice and spit out the rind when you're done. Really good stuff and enjoy!