Maple steam pouring from the saphouse roof.

Very steamy group shot next to the evaporator.

Maple looooove.

Unfortunately, we are missing most of the season this year due to a business + pleasure trip out to the Pacific Northwest. We leave tomorrow and will be gone for a couple weeks. I will probably be tweeting while on the trip, but most likely I won’t be posting on the blog very much, if at all.

When we get home, though, it will be time to start our garden. AND!! Our new neighbors {renting our cottage} have three chickens, and we talked with them about maybe letting them brood out, so we might have some little chicks pecking around the farm soon! I can’t even explain how excited I am for spring/gardening/chickens. So, stay tuned for posts about all of that coming up in the near future.

Until then, stay in touch via Twitter!

It has been fun for me to share this long-standing tradition with you all.  Please let me know if you have any questions about the various steps in the process {tapping, collecting, boiling, canning}.

Since boiling can take all day, we’re usually canning late at night.  We’re all exhausted at this point, but knowing we’ll be waking up the next day to pancakes and fresh maple syrup helps us push onward.

We use mason jars for our syrup because they’re reusable, and the syrup looks so beautiful in them.  The lids are boiled in water, and kept hot until they’re screwed on.  As they cool, the jar seals.  The syrup doesn’t need to be refrigerated until it has been opened for the first time.

The first taste of syrup blows your mind.  It is silky, buttery, hot, and tooth-achingly sweet.  If you grew up eating Aunt Jemima or Log Cabin syrup, you need to run out right now and find yourself some real maple syrup to try. 

One of my favorite traditions growing up was to heat up a small sauce pan of syrup, and then drizzle it over snow.  The syrup hardens on the snow and makes maple-taffy.  It changes your life, that’s how delicious it is.

Maple syrup is a golden gift the trees give us every spring…a true miracle of nature.  The most amazing things in life are this way, it seems…you can’t quite wrap your mind around them.  And even after you learn the science of how it works, you’re no less awed by it…on the contrary, it seems more like a miracle than ever.

The sap is pumped up to the “sap house” {the building that houses the evaporator and all the wood that is needed to fire it} from the underground tank, and is held in a large metal bin.  We slowly pump it from the bin to the evaporator, where it begins to heat up. 

As the sap cooks, it is pushed through the separate compartments of the pan, so that the sap that has been boiling longer doesn’t mix with the new sap that has just entered.  New sap constantly pumps in as the older sap boils down.

The depth of the sap in the evaporator pan is crucial…if it dips too low, the syrup will burn.  My dad uses a stick with notches cut into it to constantly monitor the depth of the sap in the pan.

The job of the “firer” is to keep the evaporated stoked with wood and at a consistent level of hotness.  It is a coveted job, glorified by our dad so that from the moment we were old enough to swing an axe over our shoulders {at about eight years old, to the horror of our mother} we begged to be chosen as the firer.

{I suspect we were tricked into doing many chores as children by this same method…make the chore into a task of honor and importance, and suddenly you have two little people fighting over who will get to do it.}

We chopped wood into small enough pieces to be fed to the evaporator, and heaved the pieces into the roaring fire.  The heat was delicious against the chilly spring air, which helped us forget the splinters we were inflicting on our little hands.  The maple steam billows from the pan and fills the entire sap house, leaving your face moist and warm.  It’s so thick and delicious smelling, you try to eat it, but it disappears.

The final step of the boiling process is to finish the cooking in the “finishing pan”- a small pan over a little gas stove, where the temperature can be more easily controlled.  The risk of over-cooking the syrup is high at this point, and constant monitoring is needed. 

As soon as it is done, the syrup is poured off into a tall cylinder and then filtered through lambs-cloth, which catches any impurities that rose up during the boiling.

The first taste of syrup is so close at this point…everyone knows it, and starts to hover around. {Stay tuned for the final step in the process: canning & tasting!}

The ideal weather for a good sap run only happens during a small window of time every spring {usually lasting a week}.  It needs to freeze at night, and then warm up to about 50 degrees during the day.  This is a tricky weather combination, but the best syrup is made during this window- a beautiful amber color and buttery taste.  Earlier in the spring, the syrup turns out very light in color, and less flavorful.  Later in the spring, the syrup is darker and thicker.  You know the season is over once you start seeing bugs floating in the sap when you go to collect it.

As I explained here, we don’t tap as many trees as we used to, because we do all the collection on foot now.  Instead of using horses to pull a sleigh with a tank on it, we now set up “collection stations” throughout the woods {large Tupperware bins}, and we dump the sap into these bins. 

The sap gets funnelled through hoses down to an underground holding tank.  It’s kept cold in there until we have enough to boil.  Since sap only has about 2% sugar content, it can take about 40-50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.  Our evaporator is very large, so we need at least 300 gallons of sap before we start boiling, or else we run the risk of burning the syrup in the pan.

A quick synopsis of how maple syrup is made can be found here, along with some neat old photos.

Our “maple mascots”, Charlie Brown and Schroeder, keep a look-out for us while we work.

The woods are quiet
except for the birds singing
and the ping-pinging.”
-Maple haiku, by Tonia

A very long time ago, when the world was new, Gitchee Manitou made things so that life was very easy for the people. There was plenty of game and the weather was always good and the maple trees were filled with thick sweet syrup. Whenever anyone wanted to get maple syrup from the trees, all they had to do was break off a twig and collect it as it dripped out.

One day, Manabozho went walking around. “I think I’ll go see how my friends the Anishinabe are doing,” he said. So, he went to a village of Indian people. But, there was no one around. So, Manbozho looked for the people. They were not fishing in the streams or the lake. They were not working in the fields hoeing their crops. They were not gathering berries. Finally, he found them. They were in the grove of maple trees near the village. They were just lying on their backs with their mouths open, letting maple syrup drip into their mouths.

“This will NOT do!” Manabozho said. “My people are all going to be fat and lazy if they keep on living this way.”

So, Manabozho went down to the river. He took with him a big basket he had made of birch bark. With this basket, he brought back many buckets of water. He went to the top of the maple trees and poured water in, so that it thinned out the syrup. Now, thick maple syrup no longer dripped out of the broken twigs. Now what came out was thin and watery and just barely sweet to the taste.

“This is how it will be from now on,” Manabozho said. “No longer will syrup drip from the maple trees. Now there will only be this watery sap. When people want to make maple syrup they will have to gather many buckets full of the sap in a birch bark basket like mine. They will have to gather wood and make fires so they can heat stones to drop into the baskets. They will have to boil the water with the heated stones for a long time to make even a little maple syrup. Then my people will no longer grow fat and lazy. Then they will appreciate this maple syrup Gitchee Manitou made available to them. Not only that, this sap will drip only from the trees at a certain time of the year. Then it will not keep people from hunting and fishing and gathering and hoeing in the fields. This is how it is going to be,” Manabozho said.

And, that is how it is to this day.

{Ojibwe Legend}

Sweet, buttery, sticky, wonderful maple syrup has been made in my family for 23 years now.  We do it the Manabozho way:

Drill a hole in a tree,
Put a “tap” in the hole,
Hang a pail from it,
Collect the sap when the pail is full,
Boil the sap in an “evaporator” {a huge pan over a huge fire} until it becomes syrup,
Can the syrup in mason jars,
Eat.

Back in the day, we used to tap 1,100 trees on our land, pouring what we collected into a big tank on a sleigh, pulled by a draft horse.  It was a lot of work, but we never thought of it that way.

There are too many wonderful things about syrup-making for it to really be considered “work”.  The smell of the air as the woods wake up for spring.  The sound of the sap as it drips from the tree.  The satisfying soreness of your arms after a long day of hauling heavy buckets.  The story-telling, snowball fights, pranks, and laughter.  The maple-steam billowing from the evaporator.  And of course, the first taste of syrup: hot, sticky, and worth it.

Even though we have scaled the operation back in recent years {we no longer have our horses, so we do all the collection on foot now}, syruping is still a beloved family tradition that brings us together, no matter what, every spring.

Some of our trees are large enough to hang two or three pails on.

When all the pails are hung, the woods fill with the soft sound of the sap dripping into the pails…ping, ping, ping…

Don’t let any snow get in the pails…

Make sure you save enough energy to have a little fun…

If you have a few maple trees on your property, I would really encourage you to try making some syrup!  Please feel free to contact me directly for more information about the process.  I would be happy to help you get started.  toniasimeone {at} gmail {dot} com

Stay tuned for the rest of the Making Maple Syrup series, coming soon!