Living with a Local Celebrity

One of our friend's brought the attention of Steve's syrup hobby to a local newspaper reporter.  Last week, she came over (along with a photographer) to interview Steve for the paper.  Here is the online version of the  story:

http://www.limaohio.com/news/local_news/article_b23f8310-a3a2-11e2-8ca6-001a4bcf6878.html

(The print version- which looks way better - is a full page spread on the front page of the region section of today's paper!)

Finishing Up a Rookie Sap Season

Last weekend, we decided to call it on the sap season and turn our liquid gold into syrup!  We probably could have extended our sap season by another week or two (sap season isn't a set time, it occurs when it gets below freezing at night and above freezing during the day.  If there's too many days of it not getting cold enough at night, the sap loses its sugar content.)  With a couple of warm days on the horizon, we knew our current sap holding system would be in jeopardy.  We keep our sap in our cold sun room, but with the warm weather over the weekend, we feared our almost 8 gallons of sap losing its sugar content.  (With the 40-1 sap to syrup ration, this means we should get around 4-5 cups of syrup, Ha!)  Instead of taking that risk, we decided it was time to turn it into its dark sweet version.  We could have still kept collecting sap, but knew the whole sap to syrup process is long and daunting and didn't want to do it again this season. So we (well Steve) pulled out the taps in the trees and we celebrated with tons of sap boiling!

We probably should have started our sap to syrup process early in the morning; however, we had things to do before it was sap time!  Like walk through a home show and sign up at Sam's for a membership we bought through an AWESOME deal through LivingSocial.  ($45 for 1 year membership, + $20 giftcard, + $20 worth of food vouchers -- 1 free frozen pizza, 1 free rotisserie chicken, & 2 boxes of free cookies).  Any way, I digressed, back to the topic at hand.  So upon returning home, Steve started to boil sap at 3 o'clock and I headed to the craft store to buy some cute little jars.

Even though we didn't think through the amount of time it was going to take, we had at least gotten the idea to have 4 pots going at the same time.  Finally, around 10 pm (which was actually like 11 since we chose the day we "Spring Forward" to convert 8 gallons of sap to cups of syrup) I called it quits, leaving Steve to figure out what to do.  He decided to just put the sap/syrup which was now in 2 pots, in the sunroom over night (it was equivalent to the fridge temperature) and we'd finish it up the next day.

After church on Sunday, Steve continued the sap to syrup process and I ran to the craft store again for cheese cloth.  We read that cheese cloth is the best way to strain the syrup before consuming it.  The final stages of boiling the sap gets a little scary.  There's a fine line from having watery syrup to having burnt syrup.  We let it go as long as we both felt comfortable and finally called it quits (by this time, we had weeded down our 4 pots, to just 1!).  We let the syrup cool off a little as we prepared the jars for canning (put them in a hot water bath to both sanitize and warm up the glass).  We strained the syrup and heated it back up to 180 degrees (needed for proper canning).

Syrup is super simple to can.  All you have to do is pour the hot syrup into prepared jars, place on the lids, tighten the rings, and wait for the cool down process!  As the syrup cools, it creates a vacuum and seals the jars.  We listened for the pops and felt confident they canned properly (only time will tell as we open the jars when we need them).  We left 1 jar uncanned and just store it in our fridge.

(Action shot of the 4 pans boiling at once.  There was so much humidity accumulating that we had to keep the kitchen windows open and finally moved our dehumidifier from downstairs to the kitchen.  While boiling sap, you have to stir it once in awhile and also skim off the scum that forms on the top when you add fresh sap to the pot.)

(Our wonderful bounty of syrup.  All in all, just over 3 pints!  We got a little more than we expected, but we may have started out with more sap than we realized.  The jar in the back right is the "uncanned" jar that we store in our fridge for our current syrup use!)

(One of the few casualties of Syrup production.  I begged and pleaded Steve to invest in different pots for the syrup process.  After our first attempt at syrup making, the pots came out fine.  However, this time, we weren't so lucky.  I'm guessing it has something to do with the amount of sap and length of time the sap boiled this time.  Last time was only 4-5 hours; this time, nearly double at around 10 hours!  I've decided to bite my tongue and continue to use the pots and pans until other problems persist.  Then Steve has lovingly agreed to purchase me new pots.  Note - these aren't just any pots, but Rachel Ray Hard Adonized pots which are pretty pricey :-/.  The other casuaity in the process -- the finish on one of the cabinets near the stove is a little messed up and flaking -- oops!)

So people have asked us -- Will we continue sapping next season??  Our answer -- YES!!  We've learned a lot of things in our rookie year and will try it again next year.  We just know we'll do things differently, like storing the syrup differently (Hopefully, I'll have my deep freezer by then.  You can always just freeze the sap until it's boiling time), tapping more trees to make the sap collection worth it, and blocking out an entire weekend at the end of the season devoted to 100% syrup production.  Also maybe an investment in a large stainless steel stockpot??

Tree Tapping Fun

Steve comes up with a lot of crazy ideas. They generally go along the lines of odd do-it-yourself processes.  Most of the time, the research and planning portion take too long and nothing ever comes about; however, some times I'm caught off guard by random trips to Menard's resulting in jumping feet first into the crazy.

A couple weekends ago, Steve and I were at Menard's for some legit items, when the next thing I know, we're in the plumbing section buying plugs for our trees.  I thought Steve's tree-tapping-for-your-own-sap idea was just that, an idea.  However, now we're living the dream.  We currently have 3 tapped trees producing sap for our own enjoyment.

The whole process is an easy one, but it takes a lot of work and supervising.  Tapping the trees is the easy part.  The hard part is keeping the sap at the correct temperature until enough is collected to make syrup.  And then the syrup production is very time consuming.

The sap needs to be stabilized at a temperature around 37 degrees.  You can always freeze sap, but if it gets too warm it spoils and looses its sugar content. We don't have a freezer large enough for the 5 gallon bucket to fit into, so we've been relying on the cold temperature in our sun-room to keep the sap cool.

Lasst weekend, Steve's family came to visit.  The weather was warming up and we decided to turn what little sap we had into syrup (otherwise it would spoil).  Plus, Steve gave me some long excuse about needing to decide if making syrup is worth it and he had to prove that more trees needed tapped.  There's a 40-1 sap-syrup ration.  Meaning, if our 5 gallon bucket was full of sap, we'd get 2 cups of syrup once its processed.  Kind of ridiculous if you ask me, but this is not my endeavor.

The easy part of the process is the tapping itself.  All that is inovled is drilling a hole, inserting a tap that will allow the sap to flow out from the tree.  We use a simple system of attaching a milk jug directly onto the tap to collect the sap.  Each evening, Steve then dumps the jugs into a 5 gallon bucket to hold the sap until its processing time.

(Drilling into the tree.  We had 3 trees tapped in the back, but 2 of them didn't produce any sap.  This is one that didn't produce any on the first go around.  Recently, Steve drilled a new hole in this tree to try again.)

(Steve thought that his tree would be the money maker since its so large and well established.  Sadly, it didn't produce anything.  We decided to take the tap out and just leave this tree alone.)

(This is the money maker.  This tree has so far has produced all the collected sap.  Last night, Steve picked another tree in the front yard -- despite my plea to keep this a secret from the neighbors -- in hopes of more sap production.)

(After the whole is dripped, the tap is "tapped" into the tree -- ha ha)

(Notice the snow on the ground and Steve bundled up as he drills.  Sap season isn't a set time frame, but all according to the weather.  The best time for sap production is when the temperatures fall below freezing at night, but rise above freezing during the day.  The sun seems to help a lot, too!  We were afraid that squirrels would bat at the jugs, so we tied them to the tree with twine.  However, the squirrels could care less, so the twine is long gone and the jugs just hang by themselves on the taps.)

(Once the sap is collected, it needs to be boiled down to make syrup.  For about 2 gallons of sap, it took us 4 hours to boil it down to make syrup.)

(We rigged up the thermometer to hang int the pot to get an accurate read.  I'm not really sure why the temperature was monitored, other than to make sure it was boiling correctly.  A scum/foam would form on the top of the sap that needed to be taken off periodically.  Stirring would occur once in awhile because the syrup would sink to the bottom.  There was round the clock supervision to make sure boiling and scum removal was happening.  The closer it got to syrup, the less supervision was needed. In the end, we ended up with less than a 1/2 cup of syrup.  Yum!!)

(This morning, we enjoyed pancakes with our own syrup!  The syrup needs to be filtered (we didn't have one) to get some of the wood pulp out.  We also could have boiled it a little longer to make the syrup thicker.  It passed the test to continue on in the sap collection! Mmmmmm!)