As I was looking through the herb cabinet I saw a jar of sassafras root that we harvested from our pasture so I thought that I would make some root beer. Sassafras makes amazing root beer even though recently it has been getting a bad rap by the folks at the USDA, who say that the active component of sassafras, safrole, is a “known carcinogen.” Why? They gave tons of pure safrole to rats and the rats got cancer. Later researchers noted that, like the whole saccharine scare in the late 1970s, safrole seems to cause cancer in rats — but not people. Still, many people still think that sipping sassafras tea or eating sassafras ice cream will doom you to a date with your oncologist. Just know that there are many times more “known carcinogens” in a bottle of beer than there are in any homemade sassafras product you might make. By one calculation, you’d need to drink 24 gallons of sassafras root beer a day for an extended time to get the amount of safrole fed to those rats and if you drink that much soda you would have a different problem to worry about.
I started by boiling some water and putting about 2/3 of a cup of sassafras root into a four cup measuring cup.
Then I dumped in about three and a half cups of the boiling water onto the roots. Then I put in two drops of peppermint extract to add some extra flavor.
After seeping for about 15 minutes it had the color of cream soda. After doing some research on this I found out that you could darken it by adding a quarter cup of molasses if you wanted a darker color. I chose not to add the molasses since we were almost out and this was just an experiment.
I looked up several recipes on this and all of them called for 1 cup water to 1 cup sugar. For the 4 cups of liquid I added about 1 3/4 cups of sugar and it was still too sweet. (I added an extra two cups of water and this helped make it not so sweet)
Then I stained it through cheesecloth into a half gallon jar.
All of the leftovers went to the chickens.
The root beer turned out tasting a lot better than I thought that it would. Next time I make it I am going to put in less sugar so that way it is not as sweet.
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