Making Maple Syrup at Home (Start to Finish)

so this video is gonna give you everything you need to know how to make maple syrup but unfortunately we just had a blizzard and it's really windy so I gotta take you to a better point ah okay so today I'm gonna explain to you guys how I make my maple syrup and I'm gonna talk you through the process from end to end maple trees are those common trees that have the palm shaped leaves they're abundant here especially come on you can't add all sorts of different maple trees but what works best as if you're tapping the sugar maple tree the sugar maple tree its SAP has the highest level of sugar concentrated in it so it only takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup so step one for you is to really recognize and identify your trees the easy way to do it is do it when weather is nice and there's leaves it's easy to recognize and identify a maple leaf I mean just think of the Canadian flag and boom there you go you got your symbol right there this should be fine now the time of year that you tap the maple trees is really important you don't want to do it in the dead of winter you don't want to do it too late in the spring the perfect scenario for collecting sap from a maple tree is to find those days where they're above freezing but then at night it drops below that you know 32 degree mark and if things freeze again because what happens is when it freezes the tree makes sure that its sap stays below ground but when the weather warms up the SAP shoots up the tree and starts running into all the branches and all across the wood so what happens when we're tapping is we're essentially creating a little hole that some of that SAP is gonna leak out all it takes is a drill and a little spigot type thing known as a Spile and boom you can just drill the hole take the Spile bang it in there and you're ready to go you're gonna want to attach a bucket so that you can catch the SAP and you'll probably want to cover that bucket so water or snow or sediment or you know bird poop doesn't end up in your SAP bucket but it's okay because when you do get ready to cook you're gonna drain and strain that anyway collection of SAP is a pretty easy and straightforward process you basically just go and check your buckets every day or two because I don't have a tractor or heavy equipment to move the SAP around I will store my SAP in just a standard five-gallon food grade safe bucket it's important to have the food grade safe buckets if you use like just your traditional like you know Home Depot orange bucket type of deal that has plastics that can degrade and you don't want that I prefer the metal buckets though on the trees because I've had bad luck where cold temperatures and plastic and freezing and unfreezing SAP can just crack the buckets and you don't want that I'm gonna have to deal with that when you collect your SAP it's important to keep it cool you don't want to leave it out in the Sun you also don't want to hang on to the set for too long and the rule of thumb I found is just only wait one week before boiling it down that stuff can go rancid probably the hardest part about making maple syrup is the evaporation process it's not extremely hard but there are some things that make it harder there's some things that make it easier and if you do it a smart way it's not that big a deal you have a whole bunch of water that's very diluted and it's got a very very small amount of sugar concentrated in it and what you're gonna want to do is cook off most of that water one thing I would strongly recommend against doing is do not cook it inside your house because you're gonna be releasing so much water if you are doing your main boil inside your house you run the risk of like peeling your wallpaper off with the amount of humidity that you're gonna create in your kitchen and so you've got to be really careful about that so I strongly strongly recommend that you do the majority of cooking your maple syrup outside and when you do it do it on an evaporator I remember the first year that I made maple syrup I had like just a standard propane burner hooked up to a propane tank and I took a giant stockpot and put it on top of there and when I tried to cook it that way it took hours and hours and hours and I ended up going through almost two tanks of propane so when you think about that right that's not very cost-effective it's not fuel efficient that stockpot it has very little surface area so there's very little room for the SAP to evaporate off of what's easier is if you have a large sort of flat pan that has a lot of surface area that's gonna allow much more of the SAP to boil off and it's gonna happen much more quickly you're gonna use your fuel more efficiently for this year what I did was I actually built a very very cheap cinder block evaporator both with the cost of the cinder blocks and the cost of the pans that I used to evaporate it only cost me about 50 bucks in total and so that's what I would say is probably maybe the bit most basic type of outdoor evaporator you can build you can get really fancy though there's expensive units that you can buy for thousands of dollars and my buddy Alfred actually made this amazing brick evaporator he's a Mason so he has that inhalants he can do gallons and gallons in the matter of an hour to the quality of your evaporator will affect your cooking time but you want to leave several hours for that cooking because it'll take a little while one trick with feeding fires particularly if you're trying to get it hot for maple syrup production I find it's easier to break up the wood and have nice like sort of tiny thin kindling sized pieces that you're using versus using big thick logs the main reason for that is that the the surface to volume ratio of the wood burns much hotter when there's more surface area and so lots of smaller pieces or a log that's broken up and do a lot of smaller pieces is gonna have a lot more surface area than one big thick log again that's gonna speed up your heat that's gonna make it hotter that's gonna make you cook quicker and so you know it's funny when you think about it right I guess that's is that physics or chemistry I guess that's technically physics you're using science yeah science once you start to get your SAP boiled down and it starts to taste a little bit like maple syrup and you're starting to get that nice brown color to it that's usually about the time that you're gonna want to figure out a way to finish the serum I separate the overall evaporation process from finishing because you know getting maple syrup just right and getting it at the right temperature in the right consistency is a very finicky process it doesn't take long to go from having SAP to burning your maple syrup particularly where as you're cooking at a higher temperature and so what I will usually do is once I get to that final stage where it's very close to being maple syrup I'll pull it off with my larger evaporator and I'll bring it inside and I'll cook the remainder of it down on my stove inside the house this allows me to do two things number one I can use a candy thermometer and that candy thermometer will let me gauge the temperature and to get your syrup just right you want to actually hit temperature and then number two because I've got a propane powered stove at the house here I can just you know turn the heat down a little bit to just adjust and get my temperatures just right in terms of cooking temperature now this is an important one the line between SAP and maple syrup is essentially 7 degrees above the boiling point of water at our altitude around here usually that's 212 degrees but I usually like to test it because it can change on a given day because of atmospheric pressure and a bunch of other stuff that I don't understand and so usually what I will do is try to get some water boiling you just test the thermometer and see at what temperature does that water start to boil as the temperature of the SAP turning into syrup concoction started to rise and watch it closer and closer and closer not wanting it to get to a point where I'd burn now once you hit that 219 degree mark you are ready to go you have got yourself some hot maple syrup and it's ready to come off the heat and what you'll want to do is probably strain it once or twice because you're gonna still probably have a little bit of sediment in the in the sap and you're gonna want to get that gunk out nobody likes gritty pancakes you know and then you can throw it in a mason jar seal it on up and there you have it that's how you have your own maple syrup I think the only other last step is you should make yourself a batch of Pancakes get some nice good batter going fry them up throw a little bit of pad of butter on top of it and then drizzle all that maple syrup all over the place and enjoy those pancakes and knowing how much hard work goes into making them maple syrup don't be afraid to be generous with it you earned it you know and as you're at the store and you're out there looking at you know different types of syrup that you can buy you see Mrs Butterworth on one end you know bottle of real Vermont maple syrup on another recognize that the reason that one probably costs four or five times as much is because how much work goes into it but then as you guys know too as you taste it there's no taste quite like it and it's so it's totally worth it a special shout out and thank you to my good buddy Pin-Bo I Pin-Bo the one who did the awesome illustrations for this video you can see some a pin Bose artwork at yo pin bow doodles on Instagram I'll leave a link down below so I hope you guys have enjoyed this guide on how to make maple syrup let me show you some additional resources if you want to learn more on making that evaporate or check out this video or if you want to see how I tap freeze check out that video and don't forget to subscribe to us here at Gold Shaw farm where we are building a farm here in Vermont

Channel: Gold Shaw Farm

Views: 121,661

Keywords: gold shaw farm, making maple syrup at home, making maple syrup, making maple syrup in vermont, homemade maple syrup, tapping trees, maple sap, tapping maple trees, how to make maple syrup, maple syrup, do it yourself, diy maple syrup, maple syrup tapping, maple syrup how it's made, maple syrup evaporator, maple syrup addiction, making maple syrup from sap, vermont farm, homestead, homesteading

Id: 38A0h7YHGuE

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2019