A Maple Syrup Extravaganza

I have always wanted to try making homemade maple syrup.  For years my dad has told us about how in his childhood he made maple syrup one year up at the cottage over an open fire.  To hear him talk about that homemade syrup you would think it was liquid gold.  He dreamily reminisces about the "smokey, ashy" flavour of the syrup that made it virtually incomparable to the store bought stuff.

The hilarious part was that I was asking my grandma about this on our last visit and she informed me that my dad left out the most important part of the story.  According to Grandma, Dad was very excited about making syrup at the beginning of the process and diligently tended the fire and watched the sap boil.  However, as the sap needed to boil longer and then longer still, he got progressively more and more bored.  Sadly (though also hilariously in hind sight), right at the end of the boiling process when the sap had almost become syrup, my dad got distracted by the arrival of the neighbour kids next door.  Allegedly he forgot about the sap completely and once he finally remembered to return to the fire, the syrup was burned to a crisp!  Smokey, ashy taste indeed!  Funny how in all the years of hearing about his syrup making past, this is the first time this alternate ending has come to light.

In my humble opinion there is nothing more delicious than sugar - except for honey and maple sugar.  Maple sugar even trumps honey in my books and that is saying something since I am willing to sustain multiple itchy, painful bee stings in order to get honey.  So, I was very excited when Ian proposed trying our hand at homemade maple syrup this year.  The idea originally came from Paul (one of Ian's Scout friends) and we quickly jumped on the maple syrupy bandwagon.

After some neighbourly reconnaissance (country folk can always be relied on to know who has got the best apples, herbs, flowers, turkeys, eggs, maple trees etc.), Ian discovered that our neighbour across the street and a few doors down has a bunch of mature maple trees on his back property.  This neighbour actually has a real sugar shack back there too and in his younger years was apparently pretty serious about the maple syrup harvest.  He is older now and does not have the energy to keep doing it but he was generous enough to let Ian harvest sap from his trees.

Ian and Paul began by identifying (what they thought) were sugar maple trees and hammering in some taps.  While it is a bit challenging to tell which trees are maple versus not when the trees have no leaves, Ian and I once did a winter nature walk in High Park when we lived in Toronto where they taught us to identify maple trees by looking for an opposite branch pattern.  Sugar maple branches shoot off opposite each other.  While this helped a bit, there was no way to tell sugar maple trees from other types of maple trees so Ian and Paul did their best.

The guys tapped 29 potential sugar maple trees and tied on plastic Booster Juice (ooh, how I love Mango Hurricane Booster Juice) buckets to catch the running sap.  It took several days after tapping for the sap to begin to run because we have had very unusual weather this spring and consequently a very short sap season.  Sap only runs when the weather is -5C at night and +5C during the day.  There was really only a week this year where Mother Nature obliged with the required temperatures.

Collecting the buckets of sap proved to be quite the workout.  As the weather began to warm up, the maple forest began to turn into a muddy lake (kind of like our back yard).  Collecting sap required Paul and Ian to trek through several inches of water when moving from tree to tree.  It resulted in very sweaty men (from carrying heavy buckets of sap) with cold, wet feet.  Not a pretty situation.

Once collected and transported back to the house, the sap needed to be boiled pretty much immediately (or else kept cold and who has a fridge big enough to do that?!) so that it does not ferment.  Ian boiled the sap in a huge bucket over a propane stove on our front walkway.  Once the sap got concentrated enough, he finished boiling it in the kitchen on our natural gas stove because he found that he could control the temperature better.  I had been told by numerous people never to boil sap inside because the evaporating sugar makes all the kitchen cupboards sticky but you have to choose your battles.  I suppose trading sticky cupboards for a maple syrup harvest and a continuing marriage is not such a bad deal.

We used coffee filters to remove
random crud from the sap.

After filtering the sap was crystal clear.

Homemade maple syrup.

Our final yield was about 9L of maple syrup.  My dad joked that we were not making any money on this venture saying our syrup likely costs $100 a gallon due to all the propane it took to boil down the sap.  His estimate is likely pretty close.  The ratio of sap:syrup is close to 40:1 so it was a lot of boiling.  Besides, we are getting used to our farm endeavours costing us more money than we make; I guess we will just have to add maple syrup to the list alongside eggs, honey and apples.  Thank goodness we are not in this to make a living - just some delicious pancakes!