By Alyson Ewald
When I called up my uncle in Vermont to ask him some questions about maple
sugaring, he was full of laughing disbelief over how we do things out here in
Missouri.
"You tap silver maples-not sugar maples? You add fresh sap to partly
boiled syrup in the evaporator? You put the sap buckets straight on the ground?"
And so on.
What would probably have shocked him even more is the fantastic
taste of the syrup we produce, even under these "primitive" conditions. It's all
I can do to keep from drenching my pancakes with the stuff. Good thing we still
have some left from last spring's haul.
But I'm starting in the middle. The
beginning of the maple story is the tale of how the sap begins to flow in the
spring. When the nights are still below freezing and the days begin to warm up is
when the sap runs in the trees. But it's not running up from the roots, as I
thought when I was a kid. Springtime maple sap is freezing and thawing right
there in the trunk of the tree, and the pressure forces sap out wherever there's
an opening.
As I told my uncle, we don't have many sugar maples out here,
although we're thinking of planting some. Instead we have silver maples, which
have silvery leaves in the summertime and lovely red buds in the spring. Their
sap isn't quite as sweet as sugar maples, but they run earlier in the season, and
the flow is strong. So how to collect the sap?
This question got answered the way
many do at DR: what's the situation, and what tools do we already have? The
"sugarbush" we use is only 23 trees total, mostly on our neighbors' property and
including a few on our land. We don't have traditional metal sap buckets. But we
do have plastic 5-gallon jugs that our oil and other foods come in. Bingo! Stand
a jug on the ground under each tree, and run short lengths of plastic tubing down
to the jug from each tap on the tree. 
Sandhill, our fellow community down the
road, had already acquired plenty of spouts. Those are the plastic or metal
thingies that direct the sap from the hole you've drilled in the tree into your
tubing or bucket. The spouts we use are the smallest ones available: 5/16th inch.
They say you can tap a 4-inch tree without hurting it if you use these spouts-but
we left the babies alone and only tapped trees over a foot in diameter.
We tapped
our trees in the beginning of February and pulled out the taps on March 18th.
During the height of the season we were gathering over 40 gallons of sap every
other day. Tom and I, together with Susan W., Susan B., and others, would put on
our rubber boots, go into the woods with buckets, gather all the sap from the
jugs, and drive over to Sandhill with our treasure, trying not to let it slosh
out en route.
Luckily Sandhill's sorghum evaporating pan works just great for
maple syrup too. We filter the sap through two layers of cotton and a metal
screen, into two 16'-long pans over a raging wood fire. After a while the steam
rises in a sweet cloud, distilling the sap down into syrup at a rate of about
40:1. That means that for every 40 gallons of sap brought in by DR and Sandhill,
only a single gallon of syrup was produced. That stuff is precious!
Boiling it
down just far enough without burning it requires careful control of the fire
beneath and a watchful eye on the syrup above. Professional syrup producers like
my uncle, who gather hundreds of gallons of sap a day, have a steady stream of
syrup flowing through the evaporator during sugaring season. Not us. If we tried
to boil a mere 40 gallons of sap down to a shallow gallon of syrup in those long
pans, it would burn black before we could scoop it out. Each time we filled the
pans with sap we'd have to boil down enough of it to fit the next batch in. And
then every few days we'd scoop out all the finished syrup, wash down the pans,
and start over.
Transferring the syrup to canning jars and sealing them for the
year makes a delicious mess, especially if you experiment with all sorts of ways
to filter the syrup, as we did this year. Running the hot syrup through multiple
layers of cheesecloth was slow and only about 50% effective. Maybe next year
we'll buy something especially meant for filtering syrup. In the meantime we're
depending on the time-honored "settling" method, whereby the sugar sand (mineral
crystals, wood pulp, and other gritty matter) gradually finds its way to the
bottom of the jar. Then those of us who like clear syrup can pour it off the top,
and the less picky can eat sludge off the bottom by the spoonful.
This year we
tapped more trees than ever before, and our grand total-together with
Sandhill-was 66 quarts of syrup. I've got my eye on a few more trees to tap next
year, and we hope to get the taps in earlier, so maybe we'll get even more next
year. There never seems to be enough of such a good thing. We'll store DR's share
throughout the year, bringing out a few quarts each month. And of course we'll
deliver some to the neighbor who kindly lets us tap the trees on his land.
Oh
yes, and I'll have to send some to my uncle, to prove that even silver maples can
deliver that sweeeeeeeeeet stuff.
Alyson is Dancing Rabbit's newest member. Look
for her bio in an upcoming issue!
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