Started coking the sap today


 
LMichaels

LMichaels

TVWBB 1-Star Olympian
So I ended up with about 5 gallons of sap from the maple tree I tapped. Put it into my giant stainless steel pot and on the turkey fryer. Well about 5 hours later and a little over half a tank of propane, I have about 2 or 3 cups of finished syrup. It tastes really nice but it's not clear like I expected. It went in the pot looking like water but when cooked down it is rather pale in color and a bit cloudy.
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Dang, I would not have guessed you could get that much sap out of a single tree. And how do you get from 5 gallons of sap to a couple cups of syrup? Does the rest just evaporate?
 
You'd be very surprised how much sap you can get out of a big sugar maple, especially over a full season. I remember emptying multiple 10qt buckets almost daily on some trees when I was a rugrat.

Maple syrup always caramelizes, you'll never get a clear syrup in the end. It's a 40:1 reduction, to get 1 gallon of syrup, you have to start with 40 gallons of sap. Cook it to temp to get the right sugar concentration (and I'd have to go looking for what temp.) Filtering through a 1/2" felt filter will clear it up (and leave behind a lot of crud,) it's all of the entrained minerals in the ground water. All of the boiling I was around as a kid was hard wood fired. I haven't been around a syrup pan in probably 30+ years.
 
Turn down the spigot on that tree. I think Chris A. has advice on how to lube the valves.
 
Bruce said:
Wow. now I know why a little bottle of real maple syrup costs ten bucks.
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The energy cost in driving off nearly all of the water is gigantic. Commercial operations started using reverse osmosis to reduce their energy requirements decades ago. Nobody I know of who boils sap uses anything other than hardwood that they cut.
 
Syrup can vary not only by location, but pretty significantly from year to year, tapping the same trees.

Personally, I prefer what used to be called Grade B, now somewhat commonly referred to as Grade A Extra Fancy. It's darker (more caramelized,) and a little more concentrated than Grade A. It used to be only available on the specialty market to retail consumers, commonly available in commercial baking for maple flavoring.

It used to be that maple sugar (all water removed from the sap) was the common sweetener available, back in the Colonial era. Getting a whiter color and a pure sweetness was desirable, hence the fairly light Grade A specification now. Now that beet, cane, etc. sugars are easier to come by, getting the maple flavor back in is more desirable.
 
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