E is for Excellent

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Tiff over at Three Ring Circus thinks my blog is Excellent. If there is one award I have truly been coveting it was this one. Possibly because it relates to video games which, if you’ve read my blog for long you know I love my SNES and PS2! Still wishing for that Wii…anybody? Anybody?

Ahem!

So thank you very much Tiff and I’m going to pass this along to:

Kenna at Shrek + Fiona
Ree at Ree Writes
and
Marie over at Memarie Lane

They’re not the only excellent bloggers I read but I thought I would spotlight them. Happy President’s Day everyone!

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February 18, 2008 | Filed Under Awards | 9 Comments 

Calling all Maple lovers

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On Saturday, hubby and I took the kids up to our local nature center to learn about maple tapping and maple syrup making, as part of their annual Maple Sugaring Festival. I’m a huge fan of anything maple (excepting nasty fake maple syrup, once you’ve had the real thing you’ll never go back) and maybe someday when I’m rich I’ll own some maples, tap my own trees and make my own syrup because I’m weird and like to do things the old fashioned way like that.

We went on a little tour through the woods, where our guide showed us the basics of tapping a tree. First you need to make a Spile. You carve the end of a branch of wood with a soft pith (soft center) down to almost a point but not quite, shaving off the bark until it starts to turn yellow. Then you clear out the pith. Our guide just used a coat hanger that had been fashioned into a pusher outer sort of thingie (real descriptive, I know) and she shoved a hole through the branch, creating the Spile. Then, with a 7/16 inch drill bit, you drill a hole about two inches into the tree, put the Spile in and hammer it lightly until it is snuggly in place. Don’t hammer too hard or you might split the tree. Then you can hang your bucket on the Spile and the sap will drip into the bucket Here is a picture of the Spile our guide made and stuck in the Box Elder.

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Maple tapping usually takes place in mid to late February or early March depending on where you live. Prime weather for tapping would be a freezing cold night followed by a day of at least 40 degree weather. This is because the tree sucks up tons of nutrients before the night freeze, storing up in case the freeze will be a while. But then the next day proves to be warm and so the tree doesn’t need to hold all of that in reserve and it flows back out as sap.

An interesting thing about the sap or sugar as it can be called is that it doesn’t freeze. Below is a picture of the watery part of the sap that has frozen. It’s hard to see but there is liquid in there and that is the sugar. So the guide just took the ice out and tossed it onto the ground and poured the liquid part into her collection jug.

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Besides the tapping demonstration we also got to see how maple syrup is made. It takes a ton of sap to make just a little maple syrup. Pictured below are how many gallons of sap it takes to make just one gallon of maple syrup. There are forty five gallon jugs there.

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We saw a modern evaporator used to make maple syrup
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We also saw demonstrations of old school methods used for making maple syrup. This kid was using an early nineteenth century evaporator.
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Over here we’ve got our trusty witches kettle.
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This one is my favorite. Native American’s created this method of evaporation.

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The wooden vat is filled with maple sap. Behind it is a fire in which the demonstrator has placed some large rocks. Once the rocks are sufficiently hot, he uses his wooden tongs to remove a rock and place it into the vat of sap. The liquid starts boiling and evaporating instantly. He keeps rotating the rocks like that until the sap has boiled down into syrup.

The liquid in the jug below is Maple Sap straight from the tree. We got to taste it and it pretty much tastes like sugar water. No hint of that delicious maple flavor in the sap. But somewhere in the evaporation process that flavor comes out. We also tasted fresh made maple syrup which is always divine. Another demonstrator carried around a jar of dirt, giving people granules to taste. Well, ok, so it wasn’t dirt. It was maple sugar but it looked like dirt. It didn’t taste like dirt though. It was delicious.

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Our guide also told us that you can tap and make syrup from any type of tree. Though of course flavor will vary. She told us she wasn’t so keen on Black Walnut syrup, which is a bit tart for her tastes. Anyhow, I think I need to go make me something maple-y. Mmmmm.

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February 18, 2008 | Filed Under Good Eats | 18 Comments