March maple madness

Give us your sap

We don't have sugar maples, but we have red maples, aka swamp maples or Acer rubrum, and they work too.

Once you tap, you have to keep up with it. Cover the buckets if it rains (we used aluminum foil) and don't leave sap sitting all day in the sun. Collect and store a little while in a cool shaded place, or boil right away.

Spout and drip

Warm sun by day, with temps in the 40's, and cold at night, below freezing, cause the sap to run. Same freeze-thaw conditions that make potholes. And spring fever?

Visible evidence that the trees are waking up makes me want to weep sappy tears of joy.

Boildown

Approximately 40 gallons of sap will make 1 gallon of syrup. (Sap is 97.5% water.) Boil outside or in a special sugarhouse, unless you want a sticky sweet kitchen ceiling.

John set up the gourmet propane-fired outdoor preparation center by the frozen pond, near the maple trees. We use the big (lobster) pots we have, but it would be faster in large pans, or fancy evaporators. Really retro: pour sap into hollowed out logs and drop campfire-heated rocks into the sap to boil down.

Syrup soon

The sap is pretty much clear. As it boils down, concentrating the sugar and minerals, it thickens and gets a little color.

Our own fresh maple syrup tastes better than any store-bought. And all the work makes us appreciate every ounce and use it well. This morning, there were pancakes.

As my stepmother Julie said last year when she visited and inspired our first maple sugaring: "We're livin' off the land!"

Buckets and spouts from Agway.

Learn more...

UNH Cooperative Extension: Maple Season: New Hampshire's first rite of spring

NH Maple Producers

How to

We want to go here and watch a pro: Folsom's Sugar House, Chester, NH

As a backyard hobby

I want: Maple Cheesecake for my March 12 birthday cake. Laura our little pastry chef said she would bake it.

An abundance of maple recipes at Epicurious

Shall, then, the maple yield sugar, and not man? Shall the farmer be thus active, and surely have so much sugar to show for it, before this very March is gone,—while I read the newspaper? While he works in his sugar-camp let me work in mine,—for sweetness is in me, and to sugar it shall come,—it shall not all go to leaves and wood. Am I not a sugar maple man, then? Boil down the sweet sap which the spring causes to flow within you. Stop not at syrup,—go on to sugar, though you present the world with but a single crystal,—a crystal not made from trees in your yard, but from the new life that stirs in your pores. Cheerfully skim your kettle, and watch it set and crystallize, making it a holiday of it if you will. Heaven will be propitious to you as to him.

– Henry David Thoreau

Comments

[marja-leena]

I didn't know other maples give syrup! Have you tried birches, popular with the Finns?

[Amy]

No, but I want to... and make birch beer!

[James]

Wow, what a great thing to be able to do with ingredients from your backyard! Do you ever put some of the hot syrup in the snow and eat it like candy when it cools down? I've always wanted to do that although it would be hard for me to pretend the snow is actually "pure" and not tinged with pollution. :)

[Amy]

Marja-Leena, I forgot to say sugar maples are better because there's more sugar and the boil down doesn't take as long.

James, I have never made that snow candy but if it snows freshly while we have some syrup left, we'll try. It is very cool to use the backyard "produce" in March. It only works though if someone has a few days to devote to it, like my husband between trips. Or on a weekend for non-pilots.

[R. Sherman]

How many maples do you tap to get forty gallons of sap?

Cheers.

[Amy]

As I understand it, you can get about a gallon of sap out of one tree in one season, if you time it right and collect and use all the sap. So the answer would be 40 trees. But we are tapping 7 trees, so obviously we'll be enjoying ounces not gallons! And the process as well.

[Tim McGuire]

Very interesting....I always thought the syrup was brown but I guess that's just at IHOP!

[Marie]

It is my first day of my spring diet sans sucre and then here you go and post about maple syrup;)
The candy James is talking about is Jack Wax. The hot syrup put on a pack of clean snow is heavenly.

[Amy]

Tim, it gets darker as it cooks down. We've got a nice big brown jar of it now.

Marie, Jack Wax sounds like a relative of Jack Frost.

[Julie]

Sorry that I missed the fun! Glad that you're continuing the tradition.

[Amy]

We'll have to book you into the guest suite next year! Or this year if you can find a few days before mud season is over.