Hi everyone, we're back here today at Garland Sugar Shack. My name is Ivan Garland, beside me is my son James. You might remember us from a previous video we've done in the past with Stereokroma on how to make maple syrup. We demonstrated from start to finish, from tapping to bottling. Today, we're going to show you the things we can do with maple syrup, such as maple butter, maple sugar. Beside me here, we have a pot of maple syrup boiling and we're going to demonstrate how maple candies are made. So, what we're doing now is the maple sugar. We've just finished boiling the syrup. We had 4 litres of syrup to start. Now, we've put it in a pot to stir it. The stirring process is necessary, because although it still looks like it's a liquid form--- --- and it is --- it's actually dry. The stirring helps it to cool, and as it cools it'll become--- and as you'll see very shortly and it's starting to change colours as of right now--- more steam will come out of it, but within minutes it's granular. Maple sugar can be used in different things. Lots of people use it as a substitute for white sugar because of it's nutritional benefits. They use it for their coffee or tea. Even any recipe you have that asks for white sugar, it can be changed and you can use maple sugar instead. Some people compare this to brown sugar just because it looks like brown sugar, but no comparisons in food value or taste. As you can see, it starts to become granular right away. Still steam coming out of it. That's the last bit of humidity that's in the sugar. The fact we're stirring releases that. If we didn't stir it, it would just become a big, hard block. So now, what we do is scrap everything off that we can. And in order to help it dry, we spread it out in different trays so it's not as thick so we can stop it from clumping up. Got to keep stirring this about every half hour for the next few hours. And everything you see on the table here is the equivalent to 8 litres of maple syrup. There's multiple uses, you just have to let your imagination go. My favourite actually for the maple sugar is sprinkled on ice cream. So now that the maple sugar is done, we have to pass it through the sifter here, and we'll be taking out the bigger pieces from the sugar to complete the refining process. So that's the process of how we separate the maple sugar. We have all of our fine sugar here. This is all that didn't pass through the sifter. All the bigger pieces, we'll pass these through a blender and break it down a little bit more. That's how we get our different-sized packaging with the fine sugar and the coarse sugar. Okay, so now we've got our pot of maple syrup that we had on the stove earlier. We boiled a lot of water out of it. We boiled it down to the level it needs to be to make maple candy. Now what happens is: we'll let it pour out slowly. There's like a big spring there, a coil and it mixes it in a slow stirring to start the crystallization process to make the candies. Making maple candy is usually a 4 day process. You fill the moulds one day, let them dry, you take them out of the moulds the next day and let them dry for a 24-hour period again. These types of candies --- nothing is added to the maple syrup. It's 100% pure maple syrup. Not only does it taste good, but there are lots of health benefits to the maple, which is kind of sweet in itself. You can see they start turning white here right away. That's what you want. We gotta let these cool. We'll take them out of the moulds, and then after they're dry we just put them back into maple syrup to do what we call a crystal coating. If we don't do that, the candies are going to turn white right away. They're not going to be good for any more than a just week. So, we do all kinds of different shapes and sizes for different times of the year. The maple candies are basically just a nice treat; a taste of Canada. So hi. My name is Jocelyn Garland. I'm part of Garland Sugar Shack, and I'm here to show you how to unmould maple candies. We start with the moulded candies, turn them around. Carefully take them out. Usually we wait 24 hours, but for this video we ended up doing it a little bit earlier. These are cabins that we have... Sugar shacks, cabins. It will be another 24 hours before we put them in maple syrup, like Ivan was saying earlier, to give them a coating that protects them from drying up too quickly. What you're seeing now is the flow of the maple syrup going down the funnel into a gear pump underneath, and in the gear pump what is happening is the maple syrup is being broken down. So, all the sugar crystals are actually broken down to make it into a very smooth texture and it goes up the pipe and back in, so it does this for a few minutes until it's a perfect consistency so we can fill our pots of maple butter. The machine isn't actually turning like real butter made from milk or cream. This is only mixing in the process of breaking the sugar crystals and making a smooth texture to the maple. So now, we've just added another pot of maple syrup to the machine to make maple butter. See the different colours mixing in from the new batch. The word butter is used only because it's a spreadable texture like real butter, but there's no actual butter in this. It is 100% pure maple that's a nice actual spread on different things. and there are other uses for maple butter, too. You use it as icing on a cake instead of the traditional, artificial icing sugar. It gives it a much better flavour and a healthier topping. A few times today, I mentioned about the nutrition value of maple syrup being healthy. There's many research studies done on the health benefits of maple syrup. There's a big one here we're going to show you that was done by the USDA and Health Canada on the benefits of maple syrup. And, it shows that maple syrup comes out right on top, even above honey. Well, this concludes our day at Garland Sugar Shack. We hope you enjoyed watching the video! You witnessed the making of: maple butter, maple candies, and maple sugar. If you would like to contact us, you can do so at garlandsugarshack.ca or on our Facebook page.
