Tag: maple syrup

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The easy take on maple syrup

Syrup season ended early for us due to contractors on the property and outside commitments. As a result, we pulled out taps early and missed half of the season and half of the maple syrup we could have harvested. We usually think of harvest as a late summer and fall activity, but it’s late winter and early spring for maple syrup. For me, it’s the essential turn of the calendar that marks the end of the barely tolerable and the beginning of my favorite time of year; spring. Despite filling the jars with the ambrosial sweet stuff in March or April, it doesn’t get sampled until later in the spring or summer.

Last Friday, I made steak tips, salad, and sweet potatoes for the family. On top of the sweet potatoes, I drizzled on a coating of our maple syrup. Tasting the results of the endeavor is doubly precious. The syrup is sweet on its own, but it’s a doubly sweet reward for all the work that went into producing it.

The first European settlers learned from the indigenous First Nations how to make this fantastic product, and I silently thank them with every pour over pancakes or french toast.

Here’s a dark family secret. When the late-night talk gets intense and our attention diverts from the bubbling pot, we hear the hiss that tells us that a burn is about to start. We rush to the stove, pull the pot off in the nick of time, and have something special. It’s a rich, dark, dark caramel-colored syrup. It’s been to the very edge of burning and snatched back. Throw it away? You have to be kidding. So instead, we decant it into its own jars, add about half more of the regular syrup and compound the best maple caramel ice cream topping in the world. Poured on top of vanilla ice cream, it makes for a special treat. So the syrup moves from near disaster to glorious joy.

This is the start of our second maple syrup season—the easy one. Just open the jar and pour.

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Sweet

As you probably know, maple sap is mostly water. So to get syrup, you boil off all that water. In the meantime, all that heat from boiling and all that water make the home a moist warm environment.
We enjoy it, and as the sap concentrates, there is a faint odor of maple syrup in the air. The photo shows how our kitchen windows steam up during the process.

You do not want to make maple syrup in a kitchen that is wallpapered. I’ve heard of people whose wallpaper neatly unpasted itself and fell to the floor in rolls.

Sapping and boiling are activities that indicate the change of season. When the sap runs, you boil. It’s a pleasant enough exercise but be warned that hauling buckets of sap in the snow can be awkward. When the sap runs, you boil, which can mean late nights as you finish a batch.

But the results are sweet.

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Sap

the following post first appears in February of 2020. instead of 22 inches of snow, I am now in the middle of a storm that will drop a foot or more. But we have started making the sweet stuff. the following post talks about How I learned and became involved in this annual ritual. A video from 2018 is also attached:

Growing up in New York City, I had to wait till I joined the Boy Scouts and went camping to learn to recognize maples. But, I did not make the connection between the tree and the product of its sap for many years. Pancakes came with syrup in a bottle that was mostly corn syrup. I don’t think in those days that I connected the tree and the syrup at all.
When I first came to New England around 1964 or ’65, I was gifted with a small box of maple leaf-shaped candies made from maple syrup sugar. I rather gracelessly ate them all in about ten minutes. But it wasn’t till I went to Maine that I found out what real addiction was.
In Portland, I met a Coast Guard petty officer who’s family owned a “sugarbush” in northern Maine. Chris, like some drinkers, was always equipped with a small silver flask, except his contained maple syrup. Where other people might use sugar, he used syrup. He also used it medicinally with rum or whiskey. If his ship were about to deploy to Station Charley or Delta, he’d make sure that his mother and father shipped enough for the deployment. One of


Gradually I became syrup snob. I liked the deeper amber grades with the stronger flavor and eschewed the fancy grades the tourists bought. While working on the Smithsonian’s Festival of Folklife in 1988 I spent considerable time in contact with folks from Massachusetts who made the sweet stuff. We had a syrup evaporator set up and everyday watered down syrup so we could demonstrate how syrup was made.


Soon after this, I was gifted with a few spiles – the spout you stick into the tree. It’s been a downward trend since then. Now, as winter wanes, I begin to watch the highs and low temperatures to begin calculating when I should tap my trees. Where I’m located, the traditional date is right around Saint Valentine’s day. But, with the seasons in an uproar, I’ve set taps as early as the end of January – and gotten some very dark ambrosia! You want the temperatures to go up in the day and then plunge at night. Around the time the tree frogs start singing and buds open, the season ends. As at the start of the season, so too at its end: a matter of considerable variability.
Next time you complain about the cost of good syrup, consider how much energy goes into boiling the sap into syrup, and how much labor goes into making it. If you are in a syrup producing area, visit a sugarhouse.
Like most home producers, I boil at my house on the stove. I tap a few huge maples on my property that grow on the verge of the woods. They get lots of sun, and when I pour the sap into the boiler, I can already see the sugar shimmering in the sap before It boils. We produce several gallons for home consumption; I could push production, but we don’t need more.
I am adding a video on the process that I made a few years ago. If you decide to try, this it’s labor intensive and avoid doing it in a kitchen with wallpaper – unless you were interested in stripping the walls anyway.

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Flashback Friday – Pint XXV

I’m posting this as part of Fandango’s Flashback Friday. Originally published on April 2 of last year:

I sealed Pint XXV shut last night, and that marked the close of another sapping season for the little sugarbush behind our house. Just a bit over three gallons of syrup, enough for family needs.
This morning the dog, cat, and I went out to survey the slow opening of spring in our tiny woodland garden. Hepatica, still not quite in bloom, trout lily slowly emerging from last fall’s leaves.
The opening of the maple buds and chorus of peepers marked the end of sapping, while the slow progress of the plants that we call spring ephemerals began the opening of the next phase of spring.

After the cat gets settled into her spot in my greenhouse workshop, and the dog wanders off to harass some early chipmunks, I settle down to woodcarving while listening to the radio.

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Boil!

Hidden in every February is the coming spring. Right now, there are about twenty-two inches of snow outside. It’s slowly melting in the Fools Spring that we get around now. My path out to the maple trees is getting slick and icy as I trod the snow down. We begin the process of turning the maple sap into syrup, sap bucket by sap bucket.
Every day now starts with monitoring the expected highs and lows of temperature. The warmth of the day and the night’s chill tell me how we are progressing towards spring. The range of temperatures indicates the rise and fall of sap and allows me to guess more accurately about how much sap I can expect. To the newly initiated, it seems like serendipity. But it’s the annual progress of the tree towards leafing out and growth. Every year there are repeating shapes in the pattern of growth. For those of us who sugar, it all starts this way.
Mine is a cottage industry comfortable on my kitchen stove. We tap, lug buckets, and then it’s boil, boil, boil. Eventually, the sweet syrup is poured into mason jars for us to enjoy.

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Soon

A botanist assured me once that even here in New England, some flower is in bloom in every month of the year. Even in February. As if to prove the point, she pointed to a scraggly bit of chickweed struggling alongside a foundation. Sure enough, there were a few tiny white blossoms.
I have not found anything blooming in my snow-covered lot this February; if my snowdrops are blooming, it’s under twenty inches of snow where I can not appreciate them. But my body assures me that the annual homecoming of spring is near. I wake up earlier as more light comes in the window. The days last longer.

Every year about the middle of the month, the date varies; I tap my maple trees for their rising sap. It’s not time yet, but my supplies are outside the shop waiting for me to sterilize them. As soon as the daytime and nighttime temperatures seem favorable, I’ll take the drill, spiles, buckets, and hose out and tap the trees.
Every day I’ll be boiling sap and testing the sweet product. I think I do it as much to pace the coming of spring as to enjoy the maple syrup.

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Pint XXV

I sealed Pint XXV shut last night, and that marked the close of another sapping season for the little sugarbush behind our house. Just a bit over three gallons of syrup, enough for family needs.
This morning the dog, cat, and I went out to survey the slow opening of spring in our tiny woodland garden. Hepatica, still not quite in bloom, trout lily slowly emerging from last fall’s leaves.
The opening of the maple buds and chorus of peepers marked the end of sapping, while the slow progress of the plants that we call spring ephemerals began the opening of the next phase of spring.

Xenia settles down for a day of supervising in the workshop


After the cat gets settled into her spot in my greenhouse workshop, and the dog wanders off to harass some early chipmunks, I settle down to woodcarving while listening to the radio.

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