Making Sweet Juice

Episode Transcription:

Debi Pearl:  Hi! I'm Debi Pearl and this is my herb garden and I thought I would share with you today Stevia. I don't know if you've ever used Stevia for a sweetener, but if you have, you're going to go, "Whoa, that's not for me. It tastes like yuck." It has a real chemical taste. About two or three years ago, I liked to use natural sweeteners, so I kept trying and trying to use Stevia. I finally went and bought me a plant and got it growing. Stevia is a handy little plant. You can buy it just about anywhere. By the end of the summer, it's midsummer, very humid. I guess you can say it will become like a bush, and even the small leaves are very sweet tasting, but they taste kind of like a chemical or something.

It leaves a really bad aftertaste, but you can buy it at the store. And what you buy at the store, if you take about this much Stevia, it's like a fourth of a teaspoon or something. It's just a very small amount, and you put it in some kind of a shaky jar. I use just an old soy sauce jar. I put my Stevia in, I fill it full of water and I set it on the counter without the lid and let it kind of sour for about 24 hours, and it is amazing what it does.

In about 24 hours, the whole chemical properties change and Stevia tastes like sugar. It's amazing how it can change to where just a couple of splashes, say I put sweet juice on here, the whole office uses it. They use it for their coffee, for their tea. You can't tell it from sugar. So one bottle of powder of Stevia that you buy at the store will last you for a year or two, but I still like to grow my own Stevia.

So here's Stevia that I bought, and now it's middle of June and by the end of the summer, it'll be a really big bush. What I do is I take this green leaf. I strip all my leaves about October, late October, and when I strip the leaves, I put them in a paper bag, and I let that bag get in somewhere hot and those leaves dry out.

When they dry out and you take them out, they're brown and all these little veins will be white. Then you take those leaves ‑ I would just reach my hand out in the paper bag and I crumble them up [crumbling sound] . I crumble them all up, shake them down, and then I sift out the white powder that's in the veins right out of the leaves.

It's amazing. It comes out looking just like white powder and it comes out tasting ‑ you'd think this stuff is bleached out or something. It's not. It comes like that right out of the leaves.

It's one of God's miracle plants, if you ask me, because then you take that powder and you turn it into a slightly fermented water, and you've got a fine tasting sweetener that's totally healthy, nutritious, it doesn't raise your glycemic level, and you could with one plant, and you'll be sweet for the whole year.

So that's my pearls of wisdom for today.

Pearls of Wisdom follows the No Greater Joy team as they discuss and answer questions about raising children, marriage, simple living, gardening, homeschooling, and more! Each week will cover different topics - topics that YOU - the viewer choose! This is a great show for the whole family and anyone who wants some extra "Pearls of Wisdom" to come their way.