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The Maple Story
buckets of sap on treeThe Maple Story starts in late February or March each year. A spout is put into a maple tree - usually a sugar maple tree, but soft maples have sweet sap also.
The window of opportunity is short. Maple sap requires freezing nights and warm days to "run". When the trees start to "bud out", the season is over as the sap takes on a bitter taste. Sap content varies in sweetness from approximately 2% to 3% sugar.maple syrup

Sap to Syrup

Syrup is produced by evaporating (cooking) the sap until it is 66% solids (sugar). This evaporation requires 42 gallons of sap if the sap is 2% sugar. If one gets lucky and gets 3% sugar in the sap it takes 29 gallons of sap to get 1 gallon of syrup. Light colored syrup is usually produced in the season’s beginning gradually becoming darker as the season progresses.

Syrup to Pure Maple Cream

The syrup must continue cooking in order to make pure Maple Cream or Maple Butter. Maple Cream is pure maple. It does not contain any other ingredients and is cooked until it is creamy (230 degrees F.). Maple Cream is used on toast, English muffins, and bagels, to eat out of the jar, on a peanut butter sandwich and frosting. Maple Cream that is cooked more (240 degrees F.) is stiffer and is used to make Maple Candy Creams. This cream holds its form.maple cream and maple candy

Maple Cream To Maple Sugar Candy

Maple Cream is turned into Maple Sugar Candy by cooking it to a sugar consistency. Some moisture remains but is getting closer to the maple sugar, but can be molded or formed.

Maple Sugar

maple sugar and sprinklesThe consistency becomes granulated by additional cooking. Maple Sugar is used as any sugar but is better for you and has less calories that white sugar. It is commonly used on toast, especially cinnamon raison toast, coffee, hot cereals, and in cooking and baking.

The Maple Story concludes with the production of Maple Sprinkles. When using a creaming machine for the above processes, small hard balls form. These are extracted and smashed to small particles or “maple beads” commonly called “sprinkles”. This is a versatile pure maple product used on hot cereals, as a topping on ice cream, on squash, and in pancake, muffin, cake, and cookie batters. They are like mini “maple chips”.

Using the spout as the starting point, the approximate 3 week trip from the tree to the table is a very hard, exciting trip, but an incredible gift from Mother Nature.