Maple Syrup Making Tips

Today we boiled down our fourth batch of maple syrup, bringing our finished syrup total over three gallons - which means we've officially "paid off" my investment (meaning I've produced enough syrup, in terms of dollars, to offset the money I paid for the equipment. So the rest of the season, as the saying goes, is gravy - costing me nothing but my time and energy (which I really don't mind spending sitting around a campfire with the kids).

While I'm by no means an expert, I have learned a few things in the last few weeks. Most of these pertain directly to the Simple and Inexpensive three-pan boiling system I've been using, but some are fairly universal.

1) Maple syrup season comes just as the snow is leaving, which means the ground will be very cold and very muddy. I like to use kleenexes, newspaper, junk mail, and other "burnable" trash to start my fires (making use of it instead of sending it to the landfill - another plus for this method), but these all tend to wick up water and then not light up. To get around this, I've found it helpful to make a base of small branches under where I'm starting my campfire. This lifts my paper and other firestarting materials off of the cold, wet ground and keeps them dry.

2) Another trial-and-error tip I've learned is that it's helpful to take the time to make sure your setup is level before you start your fire and add your sap. If your pans are tipped, you can't boil as much sap in each pan, which makes the whole process take that much longer.

Catywampus pans - see how one side is full, but the other side has hardly any sap?

3) As I mentioned in tip #1, maple syrup season comes in the early spring, when there is still a good chance of wintry weather. In the middle of my last sap boiling afternoon, the weather suddenly turned and it started snowing. Of course, the last thing you want is more water in your sap! So I pulled out the canopy we'd used for the farmer's market last summer, which worked like a charm (but now smells very strongly of campfire smoke!)

Oh, no! Snow! Time for Sap Camp!

4) After 16+ hours over an open fire, my boiling pans are now very black and sooty. Instead of trying to get all of that grime off of the outside of the pan (I do scrub out the inside, of course), I simply slip the entire pan - once it's cooled off - into a plastic garbage bag. That way they don't make a mess of wherever I store them until the next batch of sap is ready. Each pan gets its own bag, and then I nest the bagged up pans together for storage.

5) It's helpful to have one pot for transferring the sap from the boiling pans into the kitchen, then another ready to filter the sap into for finishing on the stove. You want to be able to preserve as much heat as possible during this transfer to save time and energy boiling off the last of the excess water, so it's best to think ahead and have things ready so you can move quickly.

6) Since you need to make sure your sap gets to exactly 7 degrees above boiling, it's very important to have an accurate thermometer. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have one (the new digital one I bought shorts out from the steam, apparently, and shuts off before it gets up to the final temperature), so I've been depending on the "sheeting" test (which is fine in my situation, since I'm only making syrup for my own family, not selling any).

7) A useful tip I learned at Sam Thayer's class was that you can sterilize your jars of syrup (similar to canning) by inverting them for 4 seconds, as long as your syrup is above 180 degrees. So if you put your syrup in jars right away after boiling, they should be plenty hot (217 degrees here in northwestern Wisconsin). Make sure all surfaces have been touched by the hot syrup so no bacteria remain alive, and your syrup should stay sterile until the jar is opened.

I'm sure there are many more things I'll learn as I go, but hopefully these will save you some time and headaches as you get started.

Those of you who've made maple syrup before - do you have any tips for me?

(You can read more of my maple syrup adventures here, here, and here)

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