How to make maple syrup
Products
Fresh maple juice - 10 liters
How to collect maple sap
1. Cut a metal corner or a faucet into a wide-bore (from 50 centimeters in diameter) maple at a height of 70-90 centimeters. The hole should be 5-6 centimeters deep and 1-1.5 centimeters in diameter.
2. Place a bucket or hang a bottle, protect from insects if necessary with a cloth.
3. Wait 12 hours, from 1 maple you get about 2 liters of maple sap. And for 10 liters of juice, you need to collect juice from 5 trees. Collecting more sap is dangerous for the health of the tree.
4. Drive a wooden plug into the hole so that the wound in the tree heals faster.
5. Strain the maple juice - and you can start cooking the syrup.
How to make maple syrup
1. Pour maple juice into a large saucepan or metal tub.
2. Put a pot of maple juice over a fire or on an electric stove over a high heat - you need to cook maple syrup outside, otherwise, during the evaporation process, a large amount of steam formed will remain on the furniture with a sticky film.
3. Wait for the maple sap to boil, evaporate the water from it for several hours.
4. As the water evaporates and space builds up in the saucepan, add more maple sap until all the maple sap has evaporated.
5. Strain the evaporated maple syrup, while it is hot, through several layers of gauze or special cotton filters to remove twigs and sediment trapped in it.
6. Thoroughly wash and sterilize half-liter jars: put the jars in a cold oven on the wire rack with the neck down, turn on the oven at 150 degrees, keep the jars for 15 minutes, remove.
7. Pour the strained maple syrup into sterilized jars, close with sealed lids.
Fusofacts
- Traditionally, maple syrup is made from sugar maple, due to its climate predisposition, which is common only in Canada and North America. You can distinguish sugar maple from holly maple by the juice - it is transparent without whitish blotches. The second most used tree for the production of maple sap is the red maple tree, but it grows only in America.- The impossibility of import substitution and high costs in the production and delivery of maple syrup from the juice of traditional sugar maple made the cost of this product for Russians and neighboring countries incredibly high: the cost of a 0.3 liter bottle is more than 800 rubles. (on average in Moscow as of July 2019).
- A consequence of the high cost of maple syrup, in turn, has become a large number of counterfeits in our market: instead of sugar maple, they often use the common maple maple for our forests.
- The juice for obtaining maple syrup is boiled down 50 times. 10 liters of maple sap will make a 0.2 liter jar of syrup.
- The taste of maple syrup has a light woody flavor, very sweet, but the peculiarity of maple juice, despite the concentration of sugar, is its organic taste, it is not sugary sweet.
- The harvesting time for maple sap is from February to April, it is at this time that maple sap is sweetest.
- According to legend, the Indians were the first to get maple sap when an Indian practiced throwing a tomahawk into the trunk of a maple tree. From the holes where the tomahawk fell, liquid began to ooze. The sister of the young warrior tasted it, and when she felt a sweet taste, she decided to use it for food.