Trying Our Hand...

...at maple syrup making, that is!

I grew up with my Dad and brothers boiling down maple sap in our garage every spring, and ever since we moved into this house, I have always wanted to try my hand at doing it myself. On our drive home from Camden the other day, I saw someone's property covered with buckets and milk jugs, hose line and spials from about ten different trees lining their driveway, and I declared: "I WANT TO DO THAT!!!"

So, my husband - being the rockin' man that he is - shrugged his shoulder and said, "Okay." And on our way home we stopped at our local hardware store for supplies, and there you have it. Now we're tree tappers. Kev's cool like that. That's kind of how I got my chickens and my garden, too. Although, he's still not budging on my cow and my goat idea. Maybe I need to stamp my foot a little harder...

Anyway, we have a few scraggly maple trees here and there - the best one lies in a bed of poison ivy, joy to the world - and we have ourselves a little book of instructions, and my good old neighbor Lew, and the world wide web of the intra-net to learn ourselves some knowledge...right along with my gloriously fabulous memory of how my Dad and bros did it long long ago (that last one was a large joke. My memory rots a big one). But, the point is, we figured we could learn as we go, so let's just give it a whirl!

Lew gets quite a charge out of all of our ideas, so he came over just to make sure we didn't tap ourselves a Poplar tree or anything like that, and he loaned us his big old camp stove for boiling our sap outside. We've got milk jugs in some trees and five gallon buckets with hoses in the trees that run a little better, and the whole family is getting in on figuring out just what in the world we are doing.

And now the fun begins. Mom and I always loved to go out and sneak teacups full of the sap before it got too super sweet and syrupy. We said that we were drinking maple tea! It is so delicious at every stage of the game, really. Right from the tree it tastes like sugar water, and the longer it boils, the sweeter it becomes.

See? Right from the tree - delish.
We are also a highly sanitary operation over in these here parts...


To say that we are a "small operation" would be putting things EVER so generously. It takes about 30 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of syrup, so we are very very "wee" in our operations over here. Our first batch yielded about 2 ounces of the liquid gold.

(There it is! Just two baby ounces. This batch we cooked just a tad too long. It was really thick and syrupy the way we like it, but it began crystallizing after a couple of days).

Batch number two yielded about half of a pint. We are tiny. But, it's fun, and we're getting enough for a gloriously delicious pancake feed every couple of days and just a bit to share on the side, as well.

(This is batch number two. We filtered it better, and we didn't cook it quite as long. Runnier than I prefer, so next time we might cook it just a tad longer.

Methinks a candy thermometer would be helpful in this whole process, but we are just doing it the old fashioned "eye ball" and "taste test" way. So says my book - should one want to try this for themselves in a more "correct" way, shall I say - when the syrup is 6 degrees above the boiling point of water, it is ready for finishing. Take your evaporator pan off the fire, filter it into another pan to bring inside and finish on the stove. Once it reaches at least 180 degrees, pour directly into hot mason jars, seal immediately, and let them cool slowly. The heat will cause the jars to seal themselves, or you can store syrup in your fridge for several months.

Or, if you are like us...you can eat it up posthaste.

Or - one can also take the hot syrup and pour it directly onto snow like the Old Timers used to do for an old fashioned candy called "Jack Wax." It becomes kind of like a chewy taffy of sorts.

Good good times.
Lessons learning, and delicious ones at that!