#labor-intensive

[brewscoop]

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[kitchenplusone-blog]

Boiling down tree sap to make maple syrup.

I made my first visit to the North Park Village Nature Center today for their Maple Syrup Festival. My mother has often told me about tapping maple trees in Northern Minnesota, so I thought it would be cool to go see for myself how it works, a little closer to home. 

This is the process for tapping maple trees in the Chicago Park District.

1. Trees are marked with colored ribbons (red, white, and blue) which indicates how many taps a tree can support. Younger trees have a smaller trunk and can only safely support one tap. Older trees, with wider trunks are marked with white ribbon,  indicating they can support three taps.

2. A hole for the spigot must be drilled. Here, people use hand-powered drills, but in more industrial operations (such as in Vermont) gas-powered drills may be used. After a hole has been drilled into the tree, it is cleared of sawdust and then the spout is gently hammered into the tree trunk.

*Note: at the end of the season, the hole in the trunk will heal itself creating a "button." This is a sort of "scar" and for this reason, the spout is drilled into a different part of the trunk the next year.

3. A water jug or bucket is hung from the spout. In Chicago, water jugs are used because milk jugs cannot be cleaned well enough. Depending on the season, sometimes jugs can be filled and emptied two times a day. Due to the blizzard earlier this year an excess of water caused more sap to drain from the trees.

4. Sap is collected and boiled down. It takes 40 gallons of tree sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. When the sap is harvested it is more than 95% water. As the sap is boiled (for hours and hours) the water evaporates, leaving a caramelized, amber syrup.

5. Syrup is strained through a sieve or cheesecloth and bottled for sale.

Tapping, harvesting, and processing maple tree sap is incredibly labor intensive, which is why the cost of pure maple syrup is high. I promise you it is worth every cent.