Sugar makin!

Sugar camp

The first time I remember eating maple syrup was in New Hampshire around 1981. My family lived at a small collective and one of my earliest memories was a pancake breakfast.  This was no ordinary fund-raiser or church get together. This was THE syrup breakfast.  We all bundled up and headed to the big lot where the men had set up what I’ve come to learn was a sugar shack.  It was basically a rectangular pole structure with a roof and open sides. Under the roof was a giant square pan with a wood fire burning underneath. Men stirred what was in the pan with spoons the size of canoe paddles and it smelled like a diabetic heaven!   All the local maples had been tapped and collected for days and the sap was cooking down into syrupy goodness. My family didn’t stay long in New Hampshire but my Dad still won’t eat maple syrup unless it is the100% real deal from NH or VM. I won't either. I guess some things learned just stay with you.

Collecting sap

Making maple syrup requires a lot of work and a lot of waiting. For the small producer or the hobbyist, the factors that are beyond control far outweigh the controllables.   It’s a lesson in patience.
You can’t make the trees run;  you can’t make the wind stop; you can’t make the temperature fluctuate in just the right way.  Once you have the sap collected and the fire burning, you can’t make it boil any faster.  There’s work involved for sure, and after just 3 days of “sugar makin” I was exhausted. But with as much work as is involved, there’s still plenty of time to sit and reflect and just enjoy the elements, the process and people that are with you.

Sugar camp coffee

Mornings were a routine that I could sure get used to!  The quickening of the forest acted as an alarm. Birds, squirrels, and on this trip one deer (!) moving about beginning their day stirred the blood in me. We enjoyed breakfasts of thick slab bacon and eggs with toast cooked over a campfire with a good pot of camp coffee as the world warmed.  When temperatures are right for sap to flow it drops to below freezing all night then warms throughout the day. If the temperatures are warm during the night and rise too high during the day like they do later in the spring, buds start to form and the sap is worthless for sugar making. It is bitter and sugar makers call it "buddy sap" Even thought the temp drops below freezing, trickles of sap still end up in the jugs and those are frozen solid until the sun has had time to work its magic.  There was no sense in punching a clock and rushing to the office. The office was frozen.

Building the pan

Building the pan in which to boil down the sap was a marvel! I’d heard descriptions from Dale’s mom, Wanna about how she had built pans and then had careless watchers burn them up when the fire got too high. She went into good detail about how they were built but I never really wrapped my mind around the concept until Dale and I put one together.   It’s a simple concept, but one that required 2 days of labor and some consternation.  Boat builders must share the frustration I felt at trying to create a water tight seal with wood metal and nails. Trust me folks, it ain’t easy! It’s simple. It’s not easy. Between building a 50 gallon pan from raw materials and lugging gallons and gallons of sap from trees to our holding container we passed the days until we had enough sap to start cooking.

Watch the fire!

There’s one rule to cooking the syrup: Watch the fire.  Its hungry, its temperamental, it is the major factor in how fast or slow your water cooks down, and if it gets to high you ruin the pan you just spent 2 days and some busted knuckles building. Watch the fire.

Filtering

Once the sap was cooked down from 50 gallons to about 2 over the fire we strained the syrup/sap into a pot big enough to accommodate its boil and brought it inside.  It’s a lot easier to control the heat on a range, and when the syrup boils down that much it’s easy to go too far and end up with a scorched black mess if you're still over an open fire.

There was a lot of sediment from the trees pith and the syrup was really cloudy at this point. The research that I did all pointed toward filtering and decanting as the method for clarification.  All this filtering and decanting is a time consuming process.  I decided to use a technique I’ve used many times for clarifying stock: slowly simmering egg whites in the pot.  As the egg whites coagulate they trap all the sediment and rise to the top where once the clarification is complete the “raft” can be scooped off and added to the compost bin or given to the dogs for a sweet eggy treat. Using the egg white raft worked like a charm and the syrup ended crystal clear! Let me tell you though, The cooked egg white raft with all the impurities in it looks mighty disgusting! I'm glad I used that method cause it took a lot of really gross looking detritus out of the product!

Clarifying with an egg raft

When the syrup boiled at a temperature 7 degrees higher than water boiling the sugar content was at the right level and the syrup was done. Then we poured the (now) maple syrup into jars and sealed them. Syrup is done and two weekends of work and 100 gallons of sap resulted in 8 pints and 6 half pints of sticky goodness.

This process has been amazing! I expected to learn a lot and have a good time and I was not disappointed. It is hard work but good work. Its relaxing but exhausting. I don't know how anyone could make a decent wage with all the work and fuel that is involved in making just a very little bit of syrup. I guess the techniques available now are far better engineered and more efficient than our tiny operation but I definitely understand why real syrup is SO expensive. Seen from this angle store bought syrup is not expensive at all. It made me think about modern America's relationship to sugar and yesteryear's relationship with the same. Back in the day, these 3-4 weeks provided almost the entire supply of sugar for the year! It was a hugely important process on the homestead or farm.  It created a respect for sugar and syrup because you just couldn't get it anywhere else. You couldn't just go loading down everything with cheap sugar because it didn't exist.  No small wonder diabetes and obesity just weren't a problem on the American frontier.   I can imagine that a bit cooked down to candy for a once-a-year treat would be a very special thing for children in that era.  It seems silly to say, but this syrup is rather precious to me.

100% WV maple syrup!