First time Maple Tappers!

[Steve]

My grandpa and dad made maple syrup many years ago. I guess I was about 16 when I got introduced to it, used to love the whole process. Nothing smells sweeter than the steam coming off the evaporator. Grandpa would put in some fresh eggs, so after 10-15 minutes he'd have his lunch of hard boiled eggs.

We also made maple syrup candy, you need to be carefull boiling this down as it turns real fast. We had the litle maple leaf molds to pour it into.

I always liked putting in peanut butter when we made the "candy" seems the maple and peanut butter taste went well together, or maybe it was because pure maple candy was a bit too sweet for me.

 

[Henrietta23]

Quote:
I read otherwise in my research. What I learned was that other maples just have lower sugar content so it takes more sap to get as much syrup as you would from a sugar maple, so it is more labor intensive and less cost effective to use other trees.
We're wondering if this taste was picked up from the small nonstick pan I grabbed quickly to test the boiling down.
The sap from this tree most definitely has some sugar content to it. It was sweet, it was just this odd after taste that I'm trying to figure out.

 

[Rosalind]

Could be your pan. I'm boiling mine in the following right now:

-Stainless steel roasting pans
-Disposable aluminium foil roasting pans
-Enameled stockpot

No weird sharp taste. Although the roasting pans that are cooking on the charcoal grill have a decidedly smoky taste to them, it's nothing like what you describe. More of a hickory taste from the smoke. And I've got sap from sugar maples and silver maples, so it's not that. But I have had nonstick pans give some things a weird off flavor in other stuff, like pasta sauce and soups--I actually let most of mine die a natural death and replaced them with steel or enamel because of that weird off flavor thing.

 

[Henrietta23]

I was thinking of using the disposable aluminum ones but I wasn't sure if they'd hold up to the heat. I'm thinking about boiling over a wood fire in our chimnea with the neck removed.
Thanks for the info Rosalind-we're going to have 10 gallons of sap in a matter of another 24 hours. It's flowing like crazy this weekend!

 

[Rosalind]

Oh, they definitely hold up! The only thing I'd say is be sure to get the kind that have sort of support wires under them--we got ours at Whole Foods. It really helps when you are trying to pour it, otherwise the pan just wants to bend and spill. The disposable foil thing actually boiled the best of all my pans, since it transferred the heat so quickly to the sap. I'm saving mine to re-use, it was that good.

 

[Henrietta23]

Quote:
Oh cool, that is great information to have! We're going to need to cook some of this down SOON!

 

[freshegg]

Ive been looking at maple traders site and they are talking preheaters and stuff I dont understand. I put a couple tubes in a tree today and have a stockpot of sap so I know it wont make squat yet but what do I do with it now?

 

[Henrietta23]

Quote:
Do you have a link to that site? Never mind I found it!

 

[Rosalind]

Quote:
Pre-heating is, like, when you have trouble getting sufficient heat to get a good hard boil going on. Gas grills don't put out a lot of heat, and you need a reasonably efficient wood stove to get enough heat to boil a big pan of sap into syrup. So you'd pre-heat a pan of sap to make it boil more efficiently when you move it onto a hotter burner if you're using a gas setup. It's not usually very efficient to use the big turkey fryer gas burners, because they run through an awful lot of propane.

What I did today that worked pretty well (once it got going): I had a bunch of firewood that the firewood dude had cut a bit too long for our woodstove, but which fit perfectly inside the larger charcoal grill. I put 1/4 bag of charcoal briquettes, some newspaper twists, and two big pieces of wood in the charcoal grill, about 1" from the grill surface. I sprayed some lighter fluid on that and got it lit after much cussing (the cussing is apparently key). Once it was burning well, lots of flames, I set a disposable foil roasting pan on the grill and poured in my sap. I left the lid of the grill open, and put another pan on the other side of the grill--there was room for two. It started boiling in about 10 minutes, all I had to do was keep topping it up until I was out of sap.

Whenever the fire burned down to ashy coals, I scooted one of the pans onto the side shelf of the grill, used tongs to pick up that section of grill and slid another log underneath, then replaced the grill and pan.

By the time I ran out of sap it was late afternoon and the stuff in the pans was starting to turn brownish, so I poured it into a soup pot. It was about 2 gallons at this point (there were 14 gallons of sap this morning). I boiled the rest of it down to 3 pints on the regular kitchen stove with the exhaust fan on, the windows open and an extra fan going on the countertop. Worked pretty good and did not make too much mess. DH was actually quite pleased to see how little mess there was.

 

[freshegg]

Thanks rosiland I have never done this so I read about having to top off with more sap but how do people do just a small amount could I just put it (the 1 potful ) on the glass top stove or the wood stove for hours. I see the equipment is alot of money and hubby wont go for that he didnt even want me to go buy spigots so I just did the drill and tubing idea.