The young birch bark of sapwood adjacent to the trunk can be used as food and made porridge from sapwood. The sapwood is the most nutritious and delicious in spring in the period of juice production and intensive tree growth. When harvesting sapwood, it is best removed at the base of the trunk or from thick roots located on the surface of the earth, where it is most nutritious and juicy.
Porridge from the inner bark, sapwood of birch, recipe for cooking, especially the preparation of birch bark and cooking for eating.
Sapwood can be eaten raw, its taste is sweetish with a wooden flavor. Significantly improves the taste of sapwood, continuous cooking, during which it gradually softens, swells and turns into a single-mass porridge, which should be eaten. If this mass is dried on stones heated in a fire bonfire or other improvised frying pan, then the obtained flour can be used for baking flat cakes. By the same principle as oak acorns.
birch has a white color, glucosides (betuloside and gaulterin), saponins, a bitter substance, protocatechin, lilac, vanillic, hydroxybenzoic acid, catechins, leukoanthocyanins, tannins, tarry substances and a small amount of essential oil. Birch bark is used in the treatment of diathesis, as well as wounds and ulcers. It prevents suppuration of the affected area of the skin..
A decoction of a thin film lagging behind birch bark helps with coughing. The film is also applied to boils to draw pus. The outer layer of birch bark is birch, removed, and then dried in a dry open place. Tar and coal are obtained from the bark and wood of birch, which are also widely used in medicine and everyday life. Birch sap is obtained in early spring, before the leaves bloom. More information about birch sap is written on this page of our site. Bath brooms are harvested when all the leaves on the birch have already blossomed.
Tar obtained from birch bark contains phenol, cresols, dioxibenzenes, guaiacol. It has bactericidal, antimicrobial, insecticidal and locally irritating properties. It is part of ointments that are used to treat skin diseases, wounds and pediculosis. In the old days, birch and birch tar were used in the treatment of patients with leprosy and scabies..