A food self production failure of which Hodding Carter would be proud...

So there it is, our wonderful beautiful delicious maple syrup, sourced and boiled down right in our own little pieces of the American Dream. Ambrosia, Nectar of the Gods (for you polytheists out there). For those few of you who follow our blog, you'll know that we recently decided to go pioneer and tap the Silver maples behind the house (bane of my existence) and try boiling down the sap. We ended up with about ten gallons of raw tree juice before we started boiling it down. We were figuring about a 50:1 sap:syrup ratio since we weren't using the sugar maples everyone assumes you have to use. So call is a pint and a half to a quart of syrup when it was concentrated.

Now those who do this kind of thing professionally tend to have some specialized equipment for tapping the trees, collecting the sap, and boiling (or evaporating) it down. We were strictly NCH ghetto in these departments, so we went with what seemed to be the simplest solution: boil it down a little at a time on the stove in the kitchen. I started it on a Thursday night, figuring why not. I added syrup periodically every so often to keep the level up and at bed-time just turned the fire off. R ran it all the next day while I was at work, getting through all but about two gallons of sap. I took over when R had to go to a fireside or something, and it was all good until I put the kids to bed. Took a little while to get them down, then sat in the bedroom and worked on a term-paper. All was well until I smelled a burning smell. I said a bad word, and jumped up to run downstairs to see what I could salvage.

The haste lasted until about the time I opened the bedroom door and couldn't see two feet for all of the smoke that was there (apparently past time to replace the batteries in the smoke detectors). We're talking thick gray sticky smoke, the kind that makes you realize that you're going to have to carry all three kids down the stairs out the door and then watch the equity in the house incinerate. I was pretty sure that I had burned my house down. Ran back into the bedroom and grabbed the fire extinguisher out of the closet. Figured it was a good plan to see what I was up against before I grabbed the kids and made a break for it.

Turns out that I didn't actually set the house on fire for real, but the smoke really was thick. In hindsight I should have taken a picture, because none of you will believe how much smoke was in the house. Once I found a lack of flames, I went back upstairs and put a towel under the kid's door to keep the smoke out, then opened all of the rest of the doors and windows in the house, and turned on the bathroom fan for good measure. The smoke still wasn't all the way dissipated when R came home an hour and a half later.

So it turns out that when you boil down Maple sap, you need to watch it closely at the end. The experts (Fankhauser among them - that's right, the cheese man does syrup too) say that when the sap begins to look oily, it's done. If you take it too far and drive off all of the water, you get maple sugar instead of syrup. I have proven conclusively the if you continue removing the water after it's all gone, you go from maple sugar to incendiary device that you could use to quell you average street demonstration in Pakistan.

So how do you explain the third of a cup of syrup in the above picture? The other two gallons of sap, closely watched. It is delicious. Beyond delicious. It tastes sweet and buttery and clean. Much better than the store bought, well, not really Maple Syrup.

And yes, thanks to Ma Scotchbrite and some elbow grease, we even salvaged the pan.