Maple Sugaring in the Blue Hills
Late each winter, the DCR (Mass. Dept. of Conservation and Recreation) puts on a show about maple sugaring at Brookwood Farm in Canton. The program is really geared toward kids and families, but I’m still a kid at heart... AND I’ve got a sweet tooth. So I usually go and enjoy a sip. Kinda a right of passage from winter to spring, I guess you could say. Sort of an anti-Thanksgiving.
Maple sugar has been harvested in New England since long before the Europeans arrived here. How is it the natives learned that you could take tree sap and turn it into sugar? That’s a good question. The answer has likely been lost to the ages. I bet it had something to do with the kind of smoke they were inhaling in their camps...
"Dude! What if we, like, took the tree sap and smoked it?"
"Heh-heh! Yeah! That would be cool!"
(I’m sure you realize that there are ’Beavis and Butt-head’ types in all cultures...)
At any rate, local tribes have been harvesting maple sap for centuries. They traditionally concentrated the liquid by putting hot rocks into containers of sap. How it is that they managed to concentrate the sap by a factor of 20-to-one using hand-hewn instruments boggles my mind... But they did! As the sap is evaporated, it is partially carmelized, which is part of what gives maple sugar it’s distinctive flavor.
Of course, the colonials learned much from the natives, including how to make maple sugar. With their more sophisticated woodworking and ironworking technologies, they were somewhat more productive.
Modern maple sugaring techniques are, well, modern. Almost antiseptic, even. Plastic bags and plastic lines are used to harvest sap these days. It’s hard to argue against modern conveniences, especially when they keep products cleaner and make the process more efficient. But it just doesn’t have the same nostalgic appeal, does it?
The DCR uses wood-fired evaporators for their demonstrations, but most commercial producers use natural gas or propane - both of which have gotten much more expensive these days, like all petroleum products - as you probably are painfully aware.
It takes a lot of energy to drive off so much water...
So, local producers are forced to raise their prices to the $40-$50 per gallon range. That’s a lot of money for syrup! It’s hard to compete with the synthetically flavored corn-syrup that most people use on their pancakes.
Sugar maple trees produce the highest concentration of sugar of all the local trees - hence their name... Other maples can be used as well, but the concentrations are much lower, so sugar-making is much more difficult with other species.
There are, of course, guidelines for how large a tree should be before it can be harvested and how much sap can be taken from a tree.
Farmers have also noted that the best time for collecting sap is when the nights are below freezing, and the days are warm. The sweet sap flows mainly in the late winter and early springtime as the trees start to bud and grow. The sugar concentrations drop off later in the year, so sugar-making is limited to this time of year. It’s interesting to note that the farmers’ records are one of the most telling indicators of climate change. Records show that springtime is arriving about two weeks earlier than it did a century ago. If this continues, maple sugaring will be outsourced to Canada in a few generations... Eh?
The good folks at the DCR note that they are not licensed to produce saleable food-grade products, but the harvest that they take from Brookwood Farm and the nearby Ponkapoag Golf Course produces a fair amount of syrup. It’s fun to go and have a taste-test there.
Hope you enjoyed this tidbit of local New England fare.
Later!
Lee
The DCR and Audubon also maintain the Blue Hills Trailside Museum, and they have a small collection of local animals, including this owl:
Links:
Blue Hills Trailside Museum (Mass Audubon)
Blue Hills Reservation (DCR)