According to Holiday Insights, December 17 is National Maple Syrup Day, but no one, not even industry experts, know much about this holiday. When contacted by phone, “Maple Syrup Digest” publisher Roy S. Hutchinson mentioned “Maple Sunday,” a late winter event that originated in Maine and proved so popular that it expanded into Maple Weekend, but he hadn’t heard anything about National Maple Syrup Day.
Even with the confusion over this holiday’s origins, maple syrup is a tasty product that’s still produced the old-fashioned way in many parts of the country.
Pure Maple Syrup Really is Pure
Ron Thomas, President of the Michigan Maple Syrup Association, said that to make pure maple syrup, a maple tree is tapped and then the sap is boiled down into syrup. “It’s always in the spring when you make it. If it gets around 20 degrees that night and it gets around 40 to 45 degrees in the daytime, it will make the tree run sap. You collect that sap and, as soon as you possibly can, you boil that down into the syrup,” Thomas said via telephone.
Making Maple Syrup Requires Good Timing
Thomas said that in Michigan, the maple tree sap runs anywhere starting in late February, but normally it begins in the heart of March. “It only goes for about two to three weeks, but when you get farther East and get up into Canada, Maine, New Hampshire, it starts early in February and runs until late March because the altitude is different there. You have more snow there and the snow holds the temperatures in that area,” he said.
Thomas said that one maple tree, on an average year, will produce approximately one quart of syrup. “The sap is only good until the trees start to bud. If they bud out to where the leaves show out of the bud, it’s no good anymore. There’s quite an art to it. You catch it early when it starts to get to freezing and thawing and after it runs a two, three, four-week period, then you have to be concerned about the trees coming out of the dormant stage. When the buds start to pop up, it makes the syrup have a real rancid taste.”
It Takes a Lot of Sap to Make Maple Syrup
On the average, Thomas said, it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. “So you’ve got to boil 39 gallons of that out to make the syrup. There’s variables there; there are different sugar contents in the sap from year-to-year. If you have 2 % sugar in your sap, it takes 43 gallons to make one gallon of syrup,” he said. “At the end of the season, the sugar count will drop. You might start your season out with 3% sugar content and at the end of the season, you’ll probably quit when it gets down to 1.5.
The evaporators that remove water from the sap use different fuel sources. “There’s wood, the old original way. There are oil-fired evaporators, which are a little more efficient because they have a good steady constant heat. The same goes for natural gas and propane,” Thomas said. “If you have a good wood source and you can get wood cheap, a wood-fired evaporator is the way to go because of fuel costs.”
A Modern Twist to Maple Syrup Production
North American Indians receive the credit for creating the method of making maple syrup. “The basic process really has not changed in forever; you’ve got to get the water out of the sap. The only thing that’s different now than say a hundred years ago is we have reverse osmosis machines that will take a certain percentage of the water out of the sap to make the boiling process faster and more economical,” Thomas said
Other Products Made From Maple Syrup
You can take the syrup and cook it further and make what they call maple cream or maple butter; it’s like a spread that you can spread on toast or crackers. There’s also maple candy; they cook it to a certain temperature and then they whip it, pour it into molds and it makes little sugar cakes,” Thomas said. “You can also make granulated sugar out of the maple syrup; you have to cook that to about the hottest point you can without burning it and then you put it into a machine until it granulates.”
How to Celebrate National Maple Syrup Day
To celebrate National Maple Syrup Day, Holiday Insights recommends pouring pure maple syrup over a stack of pancakes or warming the syrup up and using it on vanilla ice cream. It’s important to note that many brand name syrups don’t contain any real maple syrup at all, so it’s important to look for the words “Pure Maple Syrup” on the label before buying it.
