How we Turned Maple Sap to Maple Syrup

Posted on Thursday, February 14, 2008 at 07:50 - Post Comment

We have been collecting sap from our trees, you may have read about it on my earlier post. This is our first year to do this.

 We have been having some very cold weather lately, so the sap has not been running for the past few days.

Here is how we turned our sap to syrup.

The picture below is the sap we collected from our Maples. Most of it was very clear except for one bag of sap was a little yellowier (is that a word?) in color.

I didn't get any picture of the process of the sap being made into syrup, but I will share how we did it.

We got about two - three gallons of sap.

Mom put on one pot full of sap on the stove. Water, from the sap, evaporated from the pot and made more room in the pot for more sap. When this would happen, Mom would add more sap to the pot. She used a candy thermometer to record the temperature when the sap reached a full rolling boil. When the sap temerature reached seven degrees higher, we had syrup!

I think I would grade this as light grade syrup. The picture shows the syrup to much, much lighter than it actually is.

It tasted wonderful!!! It was a lot of fun to do this. I hope the weather around here warms up so the sap will flow!

                           Belle

<i>Untitled Comment</i>

Posted by fultoncountymommie on Friday, February 15, 2008 at 11:20 - Link

That is so cool! What kind of taps were you using? Does it take a special type of maple tree or does it have to be a sugar maple? Love the photos!
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Sugar Maple trees are the best to use, but I have heard that any maple can be used. The Sugar Maple has a higher sugar content.
Thank you for your comment!
~Belle~

Edited by Belle on Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 01:34

Neat

Posted by poppy on Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 10:45 - Link

I wish we had maple trees at our house, all we have are birch trees (besides the pine, fir, and nut trees we have) which grow like crazy. I think we may try tapping those.

`Mary-Ann`

Edited by poppy on Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 09:46