A Photo Essay of Sap to Syrup



This is the big kettle used for gathering sap.  Although the top of the Harmon (made in Pennsylvania, USA!) Pellet Stove does not get hot enough to boil the sap, it does heat it up nicely.  Those skulls are from some of the deer I've shot.  The picture of the dog is a painting I did.

I use one of these reusuable coffee filters to strain the sap that is poured from the jugs into the collection kettle.  It strains out flies, bugs, ants, and moths all of which like to drink sap.  It doens't work for filtering the minerals from the syrup, however.  For that you'd use wool.

The warmed sap is then added to the boiling sap on the stovetop.  As it boils down a couple of inches, I add more.  It takes about an hour to boil a gallon of sap to syrup this way.  I gathered three gallons yesterday.  Do the math.

Once all the sap has been added to the stovetop kettle and has started to turn to syrup, it needs to be watched constantly.  This still takes some time, so then I sit on the kitchen counter and play my banjo.  I try not to get too involved with the song in case of a boil over.



Sap is Running at Full Drip!

     Last night went to below frost and today the temperature hit 50 F easy.  Sure enough, the trees are running like crazy.  I have eight taps in trees down by the creek and usually go in the late afternoon to gather sap.  I bring a large 30 quart kettle with me so have to haul the day's take up to the house.  Today that kettle was full!  I had to stop several times to rest and give my arms a break.  But there it is now, boiling and bubbling away.  I'm thinking we'll get about 2/3 of a pint from this today's yield of sap.
     So far, there are two quarts of syrup in the refrigerator.  Maybe a little less than that, because we've been eating some.
     The first quart is a medium amber color, not quite as light as the first quart from 2011.  Maple syrup is graded by color and I'm wondering if I missed the golden amber opportunity of tapping this year.  The winter has been very mild and although January seemed like the right weather, it was still early by the calendar.  Whatever.  Back to syrup...  The lighter in color, the higher the grade.  The lightest is called Grade A.  They say that the lighter syrup is also sweeter, but I don't notice much of a difference in sweetness.  As the syrup gets darker, the flavor also gets stronger.  I happen to like a full flavor, really mapley tasting syrup with a bit of the wild in it. 
     It is time to stop tapping a tree when the tree buds and the buds start to crack open.  At that point the syrup has a little too much woody taste to it (it's called "buddy") and doesn't taste as good as a full flavor medium amber syrup.
     By the way, if you've been following this blog, the syrup that I had overcooked and had all that sugar in the bottom half of the jar was successfully reconstituted into syrup!  I spooned the sugar into the boiling sap last night.  It dissolved and this time I didn't boil it quite so long.  I still can't read that thermometer worth a tinker's damn though, and also wonder if it's giving me a true reading.  I'm still going by size and amount of bubbles for figuring when to take it off the stove.
     PS  Had steel ground oats with maple syrup and butter for breakfast.  Yo, Boomers - d'ya remember MAYPO?

     Here is a link that will help all you budding sugar people to predict maple sap flow.  It's very helpful.
http://www.goshen.edu/merrylea/sugar/flodict.htm
    

Sap's Running Once Again

     Friday, the weather turned from cloudy, misty to cold and windy.  The trees hardly dripped at all!  On Saturday we woke to a dusting of snow which was very pretty.  By noon, it was all melted away.  It was once again very cold and windy.  Clear blue skies.  I don't think it made it out of the thirties.  The trees didn't give forth one drop of sap.
     This morning I wanted to check to see if any of the sugar maples down by the creek were running at all.  Normally, I would have just waited till late afternoon and brought my collection bucket.  Good thing I checked!  The wind had blown two of the jugs off of the trees and there was the sap - drip, drip, dripping onto the ground. 
     At around three this afternoon I collected about three gallons of sap which is now boiling away on the stove.  I'm going to have to add the syrup that sugared to it once it boils down.  This will reconsitute the sugar crystals into syrup.  I think tomorrow will be a good day for sap to run.  It's supposed to go below freezing tonight, then sunny and 50 F tomorrow.

Groundhog!

     Very disturbing.  As much as I like Punxsutawney Phil and Groundhog Day as well as the movie, I don't like to see a groundhog in my yard.  Yesterday as I was pulling in to the lane, I spied a very fat groundhog out by the old barn foundation.  It looked to me to be a pregnant female. 

     A groundhog, especially one that takes the kids out for breakfast lunch and supper, can devastate a garden in no time flat.  We had this problem two years ago.  My old dog, who died a couple of years ago, couldn't tolerate the sight of a groundhog.  He also liked to eat them.  The dog I have now doesn't usually go after them, but last year she did manage to take one out.  She doesn't eat them, however.  On the other hand, I have heard that a groundhog skin makes a good banjo head.  Maybe the next one she gets will end up on my banjo.

     We have trapped them in live cages and relocated the critters.  I'm going to set the live trap.  This coming year the price of food, on account of the price of gas, is sure to go sky high.  The yield from the garden will be very important to us and I'll be darned if I'm going to feed it to a groundhog.

     Mind you, I have no problem with Punxsutawney Phil.  He lives a couple hundred miles from our garden and is well fed by the people of Punxsy.  It's the rest of his ill bred kin that I don't much care for.

Slow day for Sap and Sugar Crystals in the Jar

     It did not go down to freezing last night.  Today hung in the high forties with a misty rain.  Very slow sap day.  I maybe got a quart of sap from six trees.  No matter, boiled it down anyways and added yesterdays partially boiled down three gallon take to it.  I netted about a cup of syrup.

     However, and this disturbs me, there is a lot of maple sugar at the bottom of the second quart jar I have.  I thought it was just minerals that precipitated out, but when I took the jar out of the refrigerator and took a good look at it, I realized it was sugar!  Not a disaster, mind you, sugar can be reconstituted into syrup.  But I just don't know where I went wrong.  Maybe boiled it a tad too long. 
     Professionals and people who rely on what pros say and do, take the temperature of the syrup as it boils.  When it hits 219 F degrees, it is taken off the stove.  I have tried using a candy thermometer, but find that it is hard for me to read.  The steam gets on the glass and as soon as I take it out so that I can read it, the temp starts to drop so I don't get a true reading.  Also, when there is only an inch of syrup in the bottom of the pan it's hard to keep the bottom of the thermometer off the metal.  This is why I have been relying on the bubble method of telling when it is ready as well as relying on when looks like syrup, feels like syrup (on my tongue,) smells like syrup, and tastes likes syrup - then it is a duck!  Just kidding.  Therefore, it must be syrup.
     I'll reconstitute the sugar this weekend.  So far, the first quart looks fine.  It's a nice amber color. Nice and clear.  Minerals at the bottom of the jar.
     We have a cold front coming in tonight.  I'm curious to see how the trees will react to this.  I really like my trees.   

The Mathematics of Sap to Syrup: Is It Worth It?




 

     In a good year it takes about 40 gallons of maple sap to make one gallon of maple syrup.  There are 64 ounces in a gallon.  Using this ratio that means that one gallon of sap will net you about 6.4 ounces of syrup.  That's a little more than 2/3 of a cup.  I don't know how much that costs in electricty.  I suspect it costs something, but I haven't figured that into it yet.  Last year when I boiled enough sap to make 1.25 gallons of syrup our electric bill did not increase.  However, I took great pains during that time to turn off anything electric that we didn't need on.  Lights.  TV.  Other.  I also employed the top of our pellet stove to heat the sap to warm before pouring it into the pot on the stove top.

     Now let's get back to that one gallon of sap.  If you boil down one gallon and end up with 2/3 of a cup you run the great risk of burning the syrup to the bottom of the pot.  It's best to have at least three gallons to boil down to syrup.  When I only have a little bit of sap, I only boil it down partway.  It's not syrup at that point, but has genrally taken on an amber color and tastes pretty sweet already.  I let that cool, pour it off into a Mason jar and stick it in the refrigerator.  The next time I boil sap down, I add this too it.  This way enough is in the pot so that it can be boiled to syrup stage without being so little that it burns to the bottom of the pot.

      If there would be a day when the sap is flowing like crazy and it would mean 24/7 in the kitchen boiling sap, I would (and did, last year) fire up the wood stove that sits in our yard.  Last year I burned scrap wood in it, but this year we have a birch tree all chopped down, cut up and ready for splitting and building a fire.

     Is it worth it and why do I bother?  This question has been posed to me by several people and I am going to wax a little philosophical here.  Is art worth the effort?  Seriously, consider all the time and effort that an artist takes to learn a craft and then create a work.  Will that artist (I include musicians here) ever see all the time spent come back as cash money?  Is money earned or not spent, the only thing that makes any work worth doing?  And syrup of all things.  We're going to eat that.  It's not even like it will hang on a wall somewhere or be recorded for generations to come.  So why bother?

     I bother doing this because it is the season of sugar.  The year goes round, the earth gives us her stuff, and this is the season to get sugar from the maple trees.  I also happen to like the taste of real maple syrup.  I suppose I could just go to the grocery store and buy some, but there stand the trees - all full of sap and ready to give us some.

      In the time it took me to write this, the sap I collected this morning has pretty much boiled down to where I'm going to pour this off into a quart jar and save for later to add to another batch.  Not much sap this morning.  Although it will be very warm today - 60 F - it did not go down to freezing last night so the trees are running slowly.  Also, the Norway Maple that I had two taps in has now budded.  I'll be plugging up those holes today and moving the jugs down to the sugar maples by the creek.  

Pancake Tuesday!

     Some call it Mardi Gras, Some call it Fat Tuesday, some call it Fasnacht, but at home in upstate New York, when I was a kid we called it Pancake Tuesday.  As part of a Lenten tradition the day before Ash Wednesday was a day of feasting.  It was also the day we got to have breakfast for supper!  Pancakes!  Sometimes with sausages; sometimes with bacon.
     As the mother of seven kids, Mom spent a lot of time at the stove that evening flipping pancakes while we sat at the kitchen table and gobbled them up.  Butter.  Sour cream in big globs.  And Maple syrup poured in great streams onto pancake after pancake.  We were hungry kids!
     My Dad tapped our great big maple tree - the one in the backyard, the oldest tree in town - and netted just enough maple syrup for our feast.  He would stay up all night while it boiled to a syrup on our kitchen stove.  Our windows would be covered in steam.  The cupboard doors would warp and the ceiling tiles would arch.  So what?  It was sugar time!
     It occurs to me that one of the reasons why the people of upstate New York call Shrove Tuesday, "Pancake Tuesday," is because that is the season of maple syrup - sugar! - and a most welcome feast for the people of the north country who still have a ways to go before spring.

Here's my recipe for homemade pancakes (I never use a mix - not even Bisquik)
1 C flour
3 T fat of some sort (Lard, butter, oil...)
3 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 fresh egg from a happy chicken
1 C milk.
Blend flour, baking powder and salt.  Cut in fat.  Add egg and milk.  Stir but not too much.  You want it lumpy.  Fry in a fairly hot frying pan that has been greased with fat (I use bacon drippings)

Great day to do the wash AND boil sap!

     The temperature is going into the fifties today and there is a stiff breeze blowing.  It's a great day to do the wash and hang it outside to dry.
     I plugged up the silver maple that is in our front yard because it has budded.  This particular maple tree always buds early.  Its sap now smells woody.  Time for me to quit pestering that tree and let it do its thing and let it get on to leafing out.  However, the sugar maples that are down by the creek generally bud late, not for a couple weeks yet as long as cold nights hold out for a spell.  I tapped three more trees down there and already the jugs each have about a quart of sap in them.
     I will be boiling sap again tonight (already boiled down two gallons this morning) as well as working on re-writes of my novel.  Oh, I'll also be folding laundry.
     So far I have a quart and a half of syrup in the refrigerator. 

My chickens drive me insane!

     Okay, so here's how it goes.  For the past whatever many years that I've had chickens, in the winter I have had to supliment their free-running feeding with crack corn and mash to keep them happy.  And they are.  The price of this suppliment has increased greatly to around $12 for 50 pounds.  So my hens are giving us six eggs a day.  I've pickled and frozen them but that's still way more than we'd eat in a month of Sundays.  So I found some buyers for great eggs from happy, free-running, sometimes supplimented chickens which should at least cover the cost of the extra feed.  I sell thenm for $1 a dozen - way less that the gorcedy store sells their eggs from not so happy chickens.  But sure enough.  I get buyers sell eggs for two weeks and now the hens get broody.  Now they just want to sit on their eggs.  Well, I wasn't born yesterday and I could see that one coming up Sixth Avenue.
     I'll mark one or two eggs with a magic marker and let the hens sit and hatch those but will snatch any other newbies from the nest.

Not much sap then OMG!

     For the past couple days the trees have been slow.  It went to freezing at night, then only low forties during the day.  Sunny, but still cool.  So today at 3 pm I checked jugs.  I didn't have more than two gallons from five trees in 24 hours.  Checked at 5:30 pm - another GALLON!  What's up, trees!  You sure have started flowing.  So I am boiling down what I have on the kitchen stove top and expect tomarrow to be a busy day boiling. I will be tethered to the kitchen.  It's okay, though.  I am reworking a novel that I wrote.
     I am a slow typist - eight words a minute - and spent the past week boiling sap and retyping this novel from hard copy onto my computer so that it could be saved in cyberspace as well as edited in Word.
     Multi-tasking.  If I must be tethered to the kitchen, I might as well be productive.  I'll let you know how it goes with the novel as well as with the syrup.  The novel has nothing to do with making maple syrup.

A Watched Pot Does Indeed Boil!

     When I boil down sap for maple syrup I boil it in my kitchen on my stove top.  I use a heavy weight stainless steel six quart dutch oven.  I set the burner at high till it starts to boil, then turn the heat back just a bit to medium high.  As the water boils off, I add more sap from a large kettle that sets on top of the pellet stove in our kitchen.  This doesn't boil the sap.  It just heats it, takes the chill off of it.
     At first the sap boils rapidly and with pretty big bubbles.  It looks like water boiling.

As the sap boils down, more sugar to water than what it started out as, the bubbles start to get smaller. It also starts to taste sweeter.

     I've never used a candy thermometer when boiling down sap for syrup.  I suppose I could but I can't be bothered with that.  I do this the same as my father did back when I was a kid growing up in upstate New York and he would tap our maple tree to make syrup.  All that sap boiling and steam in the kitchen used to warp our cupboard doors and coat the windows.  I crack a window near the stove so that helps out some.  But be prepared for a steamy kitchen.  Also, don't run off and think you have time to go get involved in something else, something that will take you too far from the kitchen.  You need to keep an eye on the sap as it starts to boil down.
     After I have used up all the sap from the big pot on the pellet stove, the sap on the kitchen stove starts to boil down in earnest.  All this time I have been skimming off the foam that collects near the sides of the pan.  These are minerals, etc.  No reason to keep all that foam there.

     Soon enough the bubbles on the top of the sap start to group up and foam toward the middle of the pot.  Taste it again.  It tastes even sweeter!  Careful you don't burn your tongue.  At this point I watch the pot very carefully.  Sap, as soon as it hits that critical temperature when it turns from watery sweet stuff to syrup, can get away from you really quickly.  I cut the heat back just a bit.  The bubbles go back to bigger.  When they get smaller again, I cut back the heat just a little more.  Taste it again.  I watch how it hangs on the spoon.  If it coats the spoon and drips off slowly in big drops I pronounce it done.  I remove the pot from the burner, let it cool down just enough so I can taste it without burning my tongue, then pour it off into a Mason jar that has been filled with hot water (pour that water out) and sitting on the kitchen counter.
     Next day, same thing and I add the new syrup to the old syrup.  If there is a day when I will not get so much syrup out of what had been gathered and to boil it down to syrup stage would have left too little in the pot to control the boiling, I don't boil it down to syrup, but save the partway stuff off in a jar and add that to the next day's batch.
     This method of pot watching has worked out for me for quite a few years.

Cheap Maple Tree Taps

     I needed a few more taps for the trees down by the creek so went to Coles Hardware Store in town.  I like Coles.  It's like an old fashioned hardware store, great customer service, and you can wander around and take your time to look at things while creating a project in your mind.  When I told the salesclerk what I was doing - tapping maple trees - she brought out some bonafied cast aluminum taps.  Not good for me!  They were $4.99 a piece and I don't want to boil down the $100 gallon of syrup any more than do I want to grow the $200 tomato in the summer.  We looked through plumbing parts and found this:

         The plastic tubing fits over the threaded end and the wedged section fits into a 3/8" hole drilled into the tree.  The tube is directed into a water jug.  If you're going to use a jug make sure it has only had water in it.  Not milk.  Even the slightest bit of fat residue left over from milk could taint your sap.  This arrangment of plumbing part and tube cost less than $2.

         I went down to the creek, drilled the hole in the tree and before I was even done drilling, the sap was flowing.  More boiling tonight!

Sugar Time!

     It's SUGAR TIME!

     This winter in central Pennsylvania has been unseasonably warm.  I wondered if I should have tapped the maple trees in January.  We had many days when the daytime hit over 50 and it went down to freezing at night.  That's prime maple tapping weather.  But I looked on the Internet to see if tapping trees in January was wise.  Normally we don't tap till mid February in Pennsylvania.  I found some information that made me put off tapping the trees.  What I found said that if we would have a cold spell trees tapped too early might start to heal over.  I didn't know if that was true or not.  A lot of stuff on the net is not.  But some is.  So I held off.  Just the same, yesterday our local paper ran an article about a man who said this was a banner year for sugar - maple sugar.  He started tapping in January.  I slapped down the paper and headed outside - drill in hand.  Tapware lined up.

     To tap a tree I use a hand drill with a 1/2" bit.  I drill into the maple tree about 3 feet up from the ground and at a slight upward angle.  This is so that the sap that runs out will run down.  I drill in about two inches.  I have some bonfide metal maple taps and a few plumbers' elbows from the hardware store.  Either type works.  Drill the hole and hammer in the tap. From the hardware store I have some plastic tubing that is then fit over the end of each tap.  This is directed into the empty water jug (a plastic gallon jug) that has been affixed to the tree with a nail and some pipe cleaner.  Twist ties will work but make sure they're sturdy.  A gallon of sap weighs a lot.
     I didn't think sap would run much today.  We had a cold snap.  But sure enough today I gathered up a gallon of sap from two maple trees.  One is a large sugar maple and the other is a red maple.  Any kind of maple tree will deliver sap but some types have more sugar than others. On the other hand, some of the maple trees bud later than others, so I guess it works out even in the end for how much syrup you get.
     The gallon of sap will only make a little bit of syrup.  So here's how I keep up with it.  I boiled the sap on the stove top while cooking dinner.  It took about two hours to boil down o where it had just started to take on a slight amber color.  The bubbles were also smaller than a full boil water bubble.  I let it cool.  Poured it off into a quart Mason jar, put a lid on it and stuck it in the refrigerator.  Tomorrow, I'll do the same.