[Syrupmakers] Questions on cooking sorghum juice

[ROB]

I knew a man that had a good mill and setup and cooked sorghum molasses for lots of people.  He usually averaged around 1000 gallons of molasses per year.  He always took his from the boiler and put it in a brass kettle while it was still boiling, and let it set until it cooled.  he never had any ill effects from it.  I imagine if you can put it in the kettle that hot and leave it to sit, it wouldn't be much different to boil it in it.  If any chemical leaches out of the pot into the molasses it would be in such a small quantity that you would have to eat large amounts every day to cause any trouble.  That is why people have cooked molasses in galvanized pans for hundreds of years with no problems.  The amount of zinc that will be released into each batch is rather small.  It is the same with cooking apple butter in a copper kettle.  Copper is toxic if you ingest too much of it, but the amount that will cook out into your apple butter is very small.  I have heard people say that copper is no longer safe, just the same as galvanized is no longer safe, but they all are ok if you are not going to eat gallons of the cooked product every day.  It is just like aluminum cooking pots, and pressure cookers-  they release aluminum into the food you cook, but it is very small.  Aluminum is also poision if ingested in too large of a quantity, but as in all the rest, too small to hurt you by cooking in a aluminum pot.  You run as great of a risk of aluminum toxicity from drinking from aluminum cans.  
All in all cooking in brass is very safe.  It is just copper and zinc melted into an alloy.   I would avoid bronze as it can have many different metal alloys in it.  From the fact that you have a brass made kettle, that fairly well assures you that you have a product made from a food safe brass, as kettles were designed for food preparation.  Lead is sometimes added in brass manufacture to make it more machineable, but it almost never exceeds 2 percent of the makeup, and is bound by the rest of the metal.  You might be surprised if you knew what else lead is in that you use every day.    It is used in water systems, in the glazing on pottery, and in glassware.  
 
I'd cook molasses in brass, and never worry one bit.
 
 
R. Wurth
 
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