Maple Syrup Musings

Strange revelation: I'm a sugar geek. Or maybe I've come late in life to an appreciation of physics and chemistry. Either way, it seems I'm fascinated by the natural laws that govern the behaviour of sugars in a change of state. These are demonstrated in the setting of jam, but it didn't occur to me until I attended a maple tour of the Stratford area that maple syrup follows similar rules.

Ontario writer, artist and pioneer Susannah Moodie, in her memoir Roughing it in the Bush, writes about an episode that might have come from any modern food-blogger's Fail Files: she describes trying to make maple syrup, and boiling away the sap on her wood stove for days and days, only to have it suddenly burn and turn to inedible muck on the bottom of the pot. As it turns out, she apparently didn't know a simple but profound physical law about change of state: when water is in the process of moving from solid to liquid (e.g. boiling) or liquid to solid (e.g. freezing), the whole mass will maintain a constant temperature.

Thus all boiling water at sea level will hold a temperature of exactly 212°F (100°C). So will a mixture of boiling water with fruit or vegetables. But as soon as the water is all gone, the temperature of the remaining mixture will suddenly start to rise to equalize the difference between it and, say, the wood fire or the electric burner.

Maple sap is 2% to 6% sugar, while maple syrup is 66% sugar. Depending on the sugar content, it takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup. It may take days to boil off the water, and throughout that time the liquid will remain at 212° (in fact, the dials on syrup evaporators are calibrated so that "0" equals 212°.

But after all those hours of boiling, suddenly at some point there will be too little water in the mix to maintain the temperature of 212°, and the thermometer will start to climb rapidly. As soon as it hits 219°, you have syrup (and beyond that, disappointment!)

Incidentally, the difference between the grades of syrup (known in most of Canada as extra light, light, medium and amber) has nothing to do with cooking time. The light maple syrup comes from the sap that runs earliest, and it darkens over the course of the sugaring-off season.

For a sugar geek like me, the book Maple Sugar, From Sap to Syrup, The History, Lore and How-to Behind this Sweet Treat by Tim Herd (Storey Publishing, 2010) is a lot of fun. It discusses the earliest methods of maple syrup production, passed from Native North Americans to Europeans, with a sprinkling of Iroquois, Eastern Woodland and Ottowa legends about maple sap – mainly explaining that the Trickster (in whatever guise) arranged that maple syrup would be hard to produce, lest lazy humans be tempted to lie around all day sucking back the syrup right from the tree.

It also shows how hollow sumac twigs were used to make the "spiles", or sap spigots, that are pounded into the tree, and how the sap was boiled away in hollowed-out trees. In short, it covers a pretty detailed history of maple syrup, with great illustrations of old tools and vintage syrup labels and ads, not to mention some pretty tempting recipes.

While in the Stratford area, I got to taste several samples of maple syrup. It was the first time I'd ever tried drinking syrup straight, and it was way too good. We tried some from McCully's Hill Farm in St. Mary's (pictured above), where we had an idyllic tour of the trees via horse-drawn wagon, and also from Hoover's Maple Syrup just outside Listowel, which is certified organic. Hoover's handles 1,850 taps; you can have one, two or three taps in the same tree, depending on its width. (I found out a lot more geeky stuff about maple syrup production while chatting with Diane and Terry Hoover, but I'll spare you. For now.)

There's still some time to visit one of the maple farms mentioned above, or, nearer to Toronto, the Kortright Sugarbush Maple Syrup Festival, running until April 10. Hoover's organic syrup is also available in outlets around Stratford, including the Slow Food Market that runs 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sundays at Anything Grows (235 St. Patrick Street).

Now, are you craving pancakes as badly as I am?

For more maple musings from Stratford, visit:

• Food With Legs
• Bon Eats
• What's On My Plate
• My Daily Bread