Maple Syrup

Maple syrup?….”mmmm” good!! That’s the first thing that comes to my mind. Recently my husband and I traveled to southwest Virginia to visit my parents. Prompted by a Christmas gift we had got for my dad, we took an unscheduled trip down to help with a family project.  With an overabundance of maple trees on the property, my dad had always wanted to try his hand at Maple Syrup making. Armed with tubing, some gadgets called spiels and some food grade buckets, we set about making our very own batch of homemade maple syrup.

Tapping the Trees

Actually, my dad got the ball rolling by “tapping the trees” about a week before we came down. What happens when you tap a tree is you take a small device called a spiel which you literally tap into a tree to a depth of about two inches. Surprisingly, we learned that you can tap, not only maple trees for sap, but walnut trees as well. We decided though to go with the tried and true first.

 

In the picture to the left, you can see actually 3 separate taps to extract sap from the tree. Tapping trees is dependent upon a couple of different factors. First, a tree must be a least 12 inches in diameter before it can be tapped. The larger the tree, the more capable it is of sustaining multiple taps. Lastly, spiels must be tapped in with the tree end slanted upwards and the “spill end” pointing down. This allows the sap to properly flow.

 

 

How Much Sap Can a Tree Produce?

The sap that is extracted from the tree actually resides in the ground and relies upon ground temperature for its ability to to travel up the tree. So ideally, air temperatures must be below 40 degrees at night, and the sun must be present during the day to warm the north side of the tree. If these two things happen, then conditions are perfect to extract up to 5 gallons of sap in the course of a day!

 

So What Do You Do With Collected Sap?

Here was a big surprise…maple sap actually looks like water! It is completely clear and has no syrup like thickness as you might imagine. It is thin in consistency and pours just like water.

Does it taste like anything? Actually yes. Once this was boiled for sanitation purposes, it was refrigerated. So the picture you see to the left is sap that has been chilled.

I sipped a sample cup of the sap and the best way I can describe it is that it had ever so slight a sweet taste. It was extremely light and not overbearing at all. In fact, I even took some and made myself a cup of tea. Because of its naturally sweet taste, I only used one Stevia packet for sweetening. It made a lovely cup of tea!

 

So How Do You Get Syrup?

 

So once all the sap has been collected in the buckets, you have to “boil it down.” In essence, sap is predominantly water. Because there is so much water present, it has to be boiled away to get to the syrup. It is the application of heat that brings about the caramelizing effect to the syrup and produces that lovely amber color that we’re all familiar with in syrup.

Have you wondered how much syrup is produced in this boiling down process? Well, like anything else, how much you get out depends on how much you put in. For our purposes, we were shooting for a gallon of syrup to be divided between me and my husband, my parents and my brother and sister-in-law. Believe it or not, it take 40 gallons of sap to yield 1 gallon of maple syrup! Yes, you read that right…FORTY GALLONS TO ONE!

 

As far as labor goes, the bulk of it was done before we arrived with my dad’s building of the evaporator furnace, you see to the left. Once that was done, the hardest part was going around to all the trees to collect the syrup and bring it to the furnace to start the process.

As someone striving to embrace a more natural  way of life, I really loved the experience of seeing the sap transform into syrup. And of course, the ultimate testament to creating a natural food was the taste test. The morning that my husband and I left to return home, my parents prepared a wonderful breakfast where we chowed down on french toast with bacon, topped off by some awesome homemade maple syrup!

Would you try to make your own syrup if given a chance?

 

Looking for a better way to live,

Cathy