Sugaring: Amateur Style
(Page 4 of 6)
January/February 1975
By Bruce N. Coulter
Why two pans? Because, if you use only one receptacle and add a little sap from time to time, most of the contents boils all day long and loses flavor. If you have two or more pans or kettles, however, you can add fresh liquid to the first, ladle from that to the next . . . and so on until you "syrup off" from the last container.
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The size of the evaporator will depend on how much sap you gather . . . that is, how many buckets you hang. The outfit I used could handle the contents of about 30 pails. When circumstances limited the scope of my operation I used only one of the pans.
While sap is boiling, a white scum forms on the surface. Although it's not strictly necessary to remove this waste, you'll get a cleaner product if you do. Just scoop it out with an ordinary fine-mesh kitchen strainer and rinse the strainer off in a pail of water.
Now a word about vigilance: Watch the evaporator like a hawk! The sap has a tendency to boil over . . . and does so in a huffy, especially when it approaches the syrup stage. The devastation created by an overflow of hot, sticky liquid is awesome. Fortunately, it's also unnecessary.
When the foam begins to climb the sides of the pan you can use any one of several methods to make it behave. For instance, pour in a little fresh sap and the contents of the pan will sink back down. A few drops of cream or whole milk sprinkled into the frothing mass will also make it subside like magic. Or you can resort to the old-time sugarmakers' method: Tie a piece of fat to the end of a stick and draw it across the top of the bubbles.
How do you know when you've reached the moment of truth . . . the point at which that bubbling, seething liquid becomes syrup? There are several methods of testing. One depends on the fact that when maple syrup reaches its correct density—exactly 11 pounds to the standard U.S. gallon—it boils at seven degrees above the boiling point of water. Altitude and atmospheric conditions at the time of measurement influence this, of course, but a thermometer reading of 219° F will be accurate enough.
Another test is by hydrometer. The hot syrup is poured into a container and the instrument—a weighted glass tube—is lowered into the liquid. If it floats at a certain level (marked on the glass), the sweetening is ready to be drawn off and canned.
Even without instruments, veteran sugarmakers can judge their sap's progress quite accurately by the look of the bubbles and the way the syrup "aprons off" a wooden paddle or tin scoop.
On my first few attempts at syrup making I tried to test the product by the flavor, and found that after a while my overworked taste buds weren't much help. Nevertheless, you can make a fairly accurate guess this way if you also note the liquid's color and state of fluidity. Whatever trick you use, it's important to be sure the syrup has reached standard weight. The cooked sap will sour if it's too thin, and crystallize—deposit a sort of rock candy at the bottom of the container—if it's too thick.
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