Adventures in Syrup

In our homesteading adventures I have read many articles and watched many youtube videos about those trying to live completely off their land. The trouble that many seem to run into is sugar and sweeteners. While sugar is not an important part of healthy eating, it is something that makes eating more enjoyable. If you are trying to eat off your land and eating food that doesn’t bring you joy, you aren’t going to stick to it for as long. You might start viewing it as bland and boring. The solution that many come up with is growing stevia and sweetening food with the leaves, but we are a bit luckier.

Now, we aren’t trying to eat only off our land, but, we do live in the Northeast and have a maple tree in our front yard. It isn’t a sugar maple, but it’s a maple, and that means we can harvest its sap and boil it down for syrup.

After watching many a tapping video, we went for it! It was a warmer winter day and we drilled into our tree (2 inches in) for the very first time. Measure your drill bit before you start and put a piece of tape marking two inches so that you know when to stop. Watching all of those tapping videos we were a bit concerned when the sap did not start flowing immediately, but the next day we were able to harvest about a half-gallon from our one tree, and another half-gallon the next day too.

Sugar maples have about a 40-1 boil down rate, so you need 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. That’s not in the cards for us, with our one tree. It seems like we will be lucky to get a quart or so by the end of the season, but this is homesteading experiment is about the process for us and not the product. It also has us thinking, that perhaps, when we look for our next property that having maples on it will be a big selling point.

Our first week…

We did it! We boiled down sap and made our own maple syrup! It might be one of the best we’ve ever tasted, perhaps because it is so fresh, perhaps it is because it’s a labor of love. We’ve had a lot of questions from our friends and family who don’t have much experience with syrup production. So we are going to share our journey, we won’t have all of the answers, and we are definitely not experts, but our whole point of this blog is for others to learn with us. Up until this year, the only maple syrup that we had experienced was eating it and going to a couple of sugar houses on Maine Maple Sunday last year.

Let’s look at the process…

We collected sap from our tree each day. We stored it in 1/2 gallon mason jars in our fridge. You have to treat sap like milk, it needs to be kept cold and used within the week. If there is snow on the ground, you can pack snow around your storage (and then we would have switched to a food grade 5 gallon bucket as we wouldn’t leave glass mason jars outside in freezing temperatures.

Next we brought it outside to evaporate over a fire. We strained it through cheesecloth in a metal strainer to get any of plant debris that might have been in it.

This small amount of sap only took about 3 hours to evaporate down to the point where we would bring it inside.

We were surprised at how easy it was to tell that it was time to bring it inside, even with a powerful flame we couldn’t keep the boil going, that was how we knew we had enough sugar content in the syrup to bring it in. Now, you technically could do this all inside, but, you would end up with an extremely humid house with potentially sticky walls, so we will stick to outside sap boiling. You don’t have to boil over wood, though we believe it added to the smoky flavor of the syrup. Some people use propane, but that’s not for us.

Once we brought it inside we strained it again before the final boil. We used a candy thermometer to get the syrup up to the correct temperature for syrup. Once your syrup hits 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the boiling point of water (which for us is 219 degrees Fahrenheit) your final boiling temperature can change depending on the elevation where you live, but it will always be 7 degrees F over the boiling point.

After we hit the magical number of 219 degrees F we let it cool in the pan for a bit and then strained it through cheesecloth again into a mason jar.

The next morning we had French Toast made with homemade fluffy sourdough and our FRESH homemade maple syrup! Mmmmm! We probably have 3 more weeks of collection and are actually thinking about adding one more tap to the otherside of our tree to increase out production.

Thank you for stopping by to join us in learning on our homesteading journey!