True confession time…maple syrup isn’t my favorite food item. I’d rather have the Mapleline flavoring that my grandmother used to make the sugar water taste like maple syrup and that brings back childhood memories. However, my husband and daughter love maple syrup and I love a project that makes them happy. Each year we head out into the wood and tap some trees.
My
husband brings in the sap and I boil it down. For the last 10 years I’ve been
boiling it in a big stock pot. That’s a good way to do it, but I get
distracted. As any mom can tell you, watching a pot boil is not a productive
thing to do.
So
I let it boil and boil and boil. Next thing I know, the smoke detector is going
off and I’ve created hard maple candy, most of it burnt and impossibly hard to
clean off the bottom of the pan.
Last
year I was introduced to the wonder of the syrup boiling pan. One of the ad
executives from The Windham Eagle told me that For the Chef had a large
rectangular pan that sits across two burners and boils the heck out of the sap.
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make my syrup creation a better process.
It took half the time to boil gallons of sap and I didn’t caramelize it to the
bottom of the pan. Success.
I’m
looking forward to boiling more sap this year in my pan, but we haven’t started
yet because it has been so cold.
Sunday
is Maple Syrup Sunday in the State of Maine. People will head to the sugar
shacks and pancake breakfasts to sample the homemade syrup the professionals
make. If you’ve never seen the process of how sap is made into liquid gold, I
recommend you check it out this Sunday. Also, I recommend you try the vanilla
ice cream topped with syrup. It’s yummy.
-
Michelle
Libby
No comments:
Post a Comment