Before the temperature exceeded 40 degrees, it was necessary to go around and tap the sugar maples so they would be ready to forfeit their sap as the days grew warmer. He got 25 taps in and decided to leave it at that for this year. Within a few days, the sap began to pour. We jumped on the four tracks in the early morning's light and made our way around the farm to collect sap. Just to clarify, "we" didn't collect; "we" went. Ken collected, I took pictures.
The vegetable plot looks so desolate this time of year, but the seeds are started under lights and are sprouting as we speak! I'll be checking in on their progress within the next couple of weeks.
For each tapped tree, a hose is securely attached onto each tap, with the other end of the hose fitting tightly through the cap of a container. This way, no contaminants or debris can get into the sap.
Of course, if you forget that the snow is going to melt, your containers are then going to be dangling a foot off the ground and that could be a little problem. (Oh, yeah...that's something that's not in the books and if NO common sense is utilized, it's a whole lotta wasted hose!)
Ken empties the containers into larger water containers and let me tell you, those containers get pretty heavy as you go from tree to tree.
Sebastian enjoys the collection process and has even stopped pulling the taps out of the trees now.
He's such a joy.
You can tell this was the first day of collection. See the smile on Ken's face? Collecting sap doesn't have the same affect on him anymore.
With a fire roaring under the cooker (which has been revised, and revised again), the sap is poured into a pot to boil the water out of the sap.
In this process, you have to deal with a lot of steam from the sap and a lot of smoke from the fire...but look at his face...he really doesn't know this yet.
It starts out slowly...
...but what we have found is that there is no time to stand around looking at it, because that fire has to be fed constantly.
The woods around our house are being cleaned of all the dead timber laying around, and thank goodness, there's a lot of it. I've always wanted those limbs picked up. It's a win-win situation for me!
When the sap starts to boil, Ken adds to it quite a few times from the sap collected that morning, which is sitting in containers in the snow to keep cool. He usually cooks for 10 hours each day.
Once the sap has thickened, it is poured through a sifter with organic cotton lining it.
At the end of the day, the thickened sap is poured from this pail into a pot on the stove in the house for the final cooking stages.
For our first efforts, we ended up with a little sauce pan of thickened sap, but now we have two cookers going...
...with an experimental third one (in the foreground), so we are now filling a spaghetti pot full of the thickened sap for the final cook every day. (Look at those jeans...huh? It's a dirty job, alright. It's a strip down at the door before you step foot in this house kinda job.)
The sap cooks for almost an hour in the house and at first, we had to watch it constantly, but now, even the candy thermometer is a formality. We can tell when it's coming close to it's final stage from the smell alone. This wonderful aroma fills the house...it's woodsy, it's mapley, it's heaven!
The syrup becomes frothy and foamy, and when it reaches a certain consistency of frothy foam...it's done. It gets poured and squeezed through a double filter and then poured into sterilized bottles.
The syrup is 219 degrees and if you turn the canning jars upside down, the heat from the syrup heats up the seal so that once they are turned right-side up again, the air is forced out just as it is in a regular canning process and the jars are vacuum sealed.
The final product is the most amazing maple syrup I have ever tasted. Cooking it over wood gives it an awesome flavor. Ken's been using a lot of hickory, and the syrup is to die for...and look at this color!
Pancakes, anyone???
