Here's that sap again:
and here's a close up. It really does look like water.
Since the way to make the syrup is simply to boil away all that water until you get syrup, PLUS when you consider that general rule of thumb of 40 gallons of sap go into each gallon of finished product - well, that's a lot of steam. One option is to set up a steam room for yourself so you can experience a spa treatment while the sap boils down. The option most people go for is to work outside so that you don't peel any wallpaper or paint off your walls. To do this, I dragged out our little box wood stove as a heat source. Here is the fire, finally started on a windy day outside.
Since I don't have "proper" evaporator pan, I used the bottom half of my enamelware turkey roaster. You'll want to use a reasonably large yet shallow pan if you can get one (roaster bottom, lasagna pan, etc), since you want a large surface area so the sap can evaporate more quickly. If you really get into making syrup, I suppose buying or making a dedicated syrup pan would be in order. Perhaps I'll follow the directions in my syruping guide for next year - but for now, the roasting pan will have to do.Once I got the fire going, I set the roaster on the top and filled it pretty full of sap. This is what it looked like all set up, with lots of scrap wood on hand for the fire.
Here you can see it just starting to steam.
From here on, this process became a matter of keeping the fire good and hot, refilling the roasting pan as necessary, and occasionally skimming off the foam and such that developed. This is what the foam typically looks like (actually taken inside, but this was a better picture than my outside shot).
You want to keep the foam skimmed off to maintain a "clean" surface area for evaporation - that way, the water vapor doesn't have to fight its way through the foam to escape, thus maximizing the evaporation.
So this whole evaporating process goes on - and on, and on, and on. It took all day to boil down our 8-9 gallons of sap. As the sap boiled down in the pan, I added more sap from our jars - filtered through a strainer when necessary, skimmed off foam, added more wood to the fire, and generally did other things outdoors, checking on it every 15-20 minutes or so. Eventually it was all boiled down except for perhaps a half-roasting pan's worth of not-quite-done-yet syrup. It tasted very sweet, but still not there yet.
At this point, I decided to take it in and finish it on the stove - a perfectly legitimate step. It was also getting quite dark outside, making it hard to see what I was doing - another good reason to head inside. I transferred the syrup into a large heavy pot that would fit nicely on the stove. Here's our pot of proto-syrup just starting to boil. It has a nice layer of foam on it, just waiting to be skimmed.
And so it boils and boils....Eventually, the boiling process transitions into the syrup process. The syrup will start to foam up all over the pot, rather than looking like boiling water. Here's what that looks like - first, as it begins:
and as the foam rises, quite suddenly, to here
and then to here
Left to its own devices, the foam would quickly overflow the pan. It's kind of funny that after all those hours and hours and hours of boiling, this foaming and potential boil-over thing happens in like a minute or less. To tame the foam, one trick is to touch the surface of the foam with some butter. I loaded up my spoon with roughly a pat of butter and did so. It actually melted and fell in the syrup, which gave it that butter-maple taste at the end of it all. Here's the butter headed towards the foam
and here it is post-butter.
From this point, you want to check it pretty frequently. One way to check when you've hit the syrup phase is to use a candy thermometer. You want the temperature of the syrup to hit 7 - 7.5 degrees F over the boiling point of water. Since the actual boiling point of water differs from place to place due to elevation/local atmospheric pressure, if you want to be super precise about hitting the right temperature, you'll want to boil some water, measure your "local" boiling point, and use that as a baseline for your own "syrup" temperature.
You can also purchase a hydrometer, which effectively measures the density of your syrup. Since I don't have one of those (although they are pretty cheap - I may purchase one for next year) and I didn't bother to dig out my candy thermometer, I used the old-fashioned "sheeting" test. You want to take the syrup off the heat as soon as the sheeting starts.
I used a thin spatula to make this test. Dip in the syrup - if it runs off like water, then it needs to boil more. Eventually when you dip the spatula in, it'll still run off, but it will "wrinkle" and lay on the spatula in a "sheet". It'll look something like this:
To the side, I had prepared a Mason canning jar somewhat in advance (did this while the syrup was headed towards the sheeting phase). I did this in my usual way: cleaned the jar with hot soapy water, filled with hot water, washed a lid and ring and dropped the lid in some nearly-boiling water until I was ready to put it on the jar.
I put my canning funnel on the jar to 1) support some cheesecloth over the top of the jar for a filtering pass and 2) to avoid spilling boiling hot syrup all over the sides of the jar. Here's my setup with my jar and funnel. I took my piece of cheesecloth off for this picture, since it was so big, it covered it all, which made it look like a small ghost on my stove. The Mason jar also still has hot water in it - that has to be dumped out before filling.
It's time to strain the finished syrup into the hot jar. I folded over a piece of cheese cloth, rinsed it out both to wet it down so that it would lay in the funnel nicely and filter well, and also to, well, rinse it out. You'll want to filter the finished syrup to remove small crystals of niter that formed during the boiling process - they can lend a bitter taste to the syrup. Some people filter several times; I did mine just once. I had spent all day with this syrup, and it was now coming up on midnight. Although I loved it and all, I was starting to feel pretty sleepy.Here's the filtering pass - I ladled the syrup from the pan through the cheesecloth into the jar until I felt like I could just pour from the pan.
I popped the lid on the jar, put a ring on it, and let it sit. Before I went to bed, I heard the seal make with that distinctive little "ping".In the morning, I checked the seal, and it was good and tight, and it would likely have stored just fine like that for a good long while. However, we were all itching to try out our new syrup, so really, I just could've put it in the refrigerator. Incidentally, if you make your own syrup but don't can, you can store it pretty successfully in the refrigerator or freeze it. I like to can, and it's easy with that hot syrup - no need to hot water or pressure process. I guess it uses what used to be called "open-kettle" canning, which personally I still use for jams and jellies and such. Open-kettle is no longer a recommended canning process though - just so you know. But I personally have never had any problems with it for high-sugar products.
This was definitely a high-sugar product. Here's a picture of the jar before opening - you can see the seal is tight (the lid is slightly indented/pushed down)
and here's something to give you an idea of the finished product. The spoon is visible, but kind of blurry.
From here, it was off to waffles! The syrup was really good, although I think I slightly overcooked it, since it had a caramel overtone to it. The next batch I made came out with "just" maple syrup flavor, probably because I wasn't trying to take pictures too. :D
If anyone out there tries this for themselves, let me know! I would love to hear your stories about syrup-making!
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