Maple Sugar Candy

The sap hasn't been running much the past week or so. Too cold, I guess! But I had enough last week to attempt a batch of maple sugar. After some research, I decided that I what I needed to do was to bring the sap up to 30 degrees F above the boiling point of water. I tested my thermometer in a tea kettle of boiling water to determine exactly what temperature our water boils at. Here, it is 209 degrees F. So I brought the sap up to about 240 degrees F. Then I let it cool until just below the boiling point of water. It is important not to stir it during this time, so say my sources.

After it cooled down, I stirred it briskly with a wooden spoon until my arm was about to fall off. By this time, it was thicker and lighter in color, but not really sugary. I think I should have brought the temperature up a bit higher. But I did end up with a few cute little maple candies by pouring some of the maple cream/sugary substance into mini cupcake liners. It was really good!

I tried to put the rest into the mixer because I had read that would help to release the moisture, but I ended up with this:

Doesn't exactly look like maple sugar does it? So I spread it into two glass dishes and let it set. Next day, it was mostly pretty hard but still had some moisture in it, so I spread it all out on a pan to dry. Then I threw it all in the food processer and pulsed it until it turned into nice dry sugar.

I am hoping it will keep for awhile, but I'm not totally sure, never having done this before. I have the little side-door of our downstairs freezer full of syrup but I am still hoping for one more good run!  Maybe the snow today will bring it on?

Linking up with The Homestead Barn Hop

Sugaring-Round 2!

We had more success this time, than the last time. Thanks to a bit of a wild, wet weekend most of our burning wood got soaked. So we were faced with a full barrel of sap and no real way to boil.

I was getting pretty desperate-sap does spoil after all! So I tried putting some sap in our two big crock-pots and some in the rice cooker. The crock-pots worked very, very slowly. Not worth it at all. I was kind of surprised. Since they always manage to dry out my dinner, I expected better out of them;). The rice cooker worked pretty well but there is only so much sap it can take!

So we resorted to this setup.

A propane-fired camp stove  propped up on the gas grill. The big barrel is a food-safe storage container we use to hold sap. Incidentally, restaurant supply stores are great! We found both the storage container and the big pan at ours.

We tried just the gas grill first but...since nothing is ever easy;).... it wouldn't start. So we busted out the camp stove.  I do not think this is the most efficient way or the most charming way to boil sap, but in a pinch it did the trick.

 Our process went like this:

Filled the evaporator pan about half-full with sap and started the grill.

Filled up a saucepan with sap and brought it in to warm on top of the wood stove, since adding cold sap on top of boiling sap slows everything down.

About every half-hour, added the warmed pot of sap to the boiling sap and brought in another saucepan of sap to warm.

Repeated for much of the day until the barrel was empty.

Then we boiled for another couple of hours and brought the rest inside to finish off on the stove. We brought it just to the point where small bubbles covered the entire surface of the liquid.  There is good picture of bubbly sap here, to show you what that looks like. Scroll down to "Complete the Boiling". In our experience, when the syrup has come to a nice full boil like this, it is done. It takes longer than you think! At the same time, you do need to watch carefully to avoid over-boiling!

We let it cool a bit, then transferred it to jars.

Not a bad haul so far. This is from about 20-25 gallons of sap. There is still some sediment on the bottom, which is normal, but we will need to filter it to make it even prettier.

It was a good day, but I can't say I am sorry to have a few days off from boiling! If you want more details, the two books I referenced in this post are great to have on hand. Also the Tap My Trees website is a good place to get started.

Linking up with Homestead Barn Hop

Sugaring Time!

It's that time of year again in New England-sap boiling time! If we are lucky and don't screw things up like we did last year-it's syrup making time! Let me tell you though, making maple syrup is a royal PITA.

Seriously.

Sure the buckets look pretty on the trees.

And I do, really, love going out there and emptying the sap buckets in the afternoons. And boiling is actually pretty fun. I daresay I enjoy the excuse to escape the chaos of a homeschooling-with-four-kids morning to go load up the fire with more wood and check on the sap.

It's the end part that gets to me. When it starts getting on towards dusk and I know it's time to put out the fire and bring the batch in and finish it up on the stove. That part takes forever. And then there is the watching and the nervous checking of the books to try to figure out just when we should stop the boiling and call it syrup. Because if you pull it too early you end up with very watery sap/syrup. We did that last year. And if you boil it too long you end up with maple sugar. We did that last year too.

This year, we have only done one batch and I did manage to turn it into sugar. No, not intentionally. But the book said the syrup should reach 7 degrees above the boiling point of water. The problem there was that I was boiling in a large pot and I didn't have the depth needed for an accurately working candy thermometer by the time it got close. So basically, I had no clue what the temperature was. Apparently over that magical 7 degrees.


The other problem was that the books all said the syrup should "apron" off the spatula. I make jam all the time, so to me, "apron" means it will slide off slowly in a kind of clumpy, oozy way.

Yeah. Well, if you let it get to that point it will look great at first.  Then it will crystallize like mad when you start to filter it. Luckily, my husband was able to rescue the batch by adding in some boiling water and reboiling it. This time we stopped when the syrup left the spatula in a stream rather than in individual drops. No aproning. It looked too thin, but thickened right up. I didn't take a picture of that first batch, which is too bad. It was really pretty! I had it on my pancakes for my birthday breakfast:).

So we had some success! But man, it takes A LOT of sap and A LOT of work to make maple syrup. Now I know why it is so darn expensive! I am hoping the process gets easier as we go.

Round 2 is up this week!