SPRING HAS SPRUNG, the sap is riz, and all Ontario has gone to visit the sugarbush, writes MARY MULVIHILL.
Is this making no sense to you? Fear not, all will be explained.
There’s nothing like a few months in southern Canada to convert you to the many pleasures of maple syrup. Delicious with pecans and raisins in porridge, or with bacon, or drizzled over French toast.
In Ireland, this was a reasonably expensive, occasional treat for us, used sparingly on pancakes and ice cream. Here in southern Ontario, it’s more a case of having some pancakes with your syrup, and every cafe table comes replete with a large bottle of the sweet amber liquid, alongside the tomato ketchup.
I had always associated maple syrup with Canada, but, despite its name, had never realised that I was eating sap from a tree. (Slow, I know!) So it was that, early on a freezing April Saturday morning, I joined some 50,000 other visitors in the local Mennonite village of Elmira for the world’s largest maple syrup festival. The amount of batter consumed on the day was, as they say here, truly awesome. Well-oiled logistics (the festival is in its 36th year) and 2,000 volunteers meant everything worked smoothly and the pancake queues moved quickly, with all profits going to local charities.
The attraction for me was not the pancakes drowned in syrup, however, nor the candy (syrup in a more concentrated form), nor the taffy (yet more concentrated again, then poured hot onto snow to cool quickly into toffee), but the chance to tour a sugarbush and visit a sugar shack.
Maple syrup production is a seasonal thing, lasting about four to six weeks in February-April, depending on weather. It takes freezing nights and mild days to generate the pressure within a tree that sets the sap flowing, bringing with it the sweet sugars the trees stored over winter.
Most farmers in the predominantly Mennonite community around Waterloo county, where we are staying, keep a stand of several hundred or more native maple trees to supplement their income. These woodlands are the “sugarbush”, essentially virgin forest where the only management seems to be removal of old and fallen trees.
Tapping maples is an ancient practice, first discovered by native people and later adopted by European settlers. Production has changed little over the centuries, save for a few improvements in the techniques used to evaporate the sap and make the syrup.
Each mature tree yields some 40 litres of sap each season, enough for about one litre of syrup. The sap itself is thin, clear and water-like, and contains about 2 per cent to 3 per cent sugar.
Each day’s harvest is warmed in an evaporator over a wood fire for about 30 minutes to reduce the liquid to the
requisite 66 per cent sugar or thereabouts (any less and the syrup could go off, any more and it would crystallise in the bottle). The rich golden colour comes from caramelisation of some of the sugars.
The Horst family farm, which we visited as part of the Elmira festival tour, taps about 1,100 trees. A few are tapped the traditional way with buckets, but most are hooked up to a network of tubes that delivers the sap direct to the “sugar shack” for evaporation, an innovation that makes collecting the sap an awful lot easier.
Only mature trees of at least 40 years and 10 inches in girth are tapped. Older, bigger trees can take two taps, and continue producing for 150 years and more. However, as one Elmira old-timer told me, it’s like taking blood from someone, and you can quickly kill a tree by greedily inserting too many taps.
The taps are pushed about 1½ inches into the tree, and in a different spot each time, although always at about shoulder height. Previous tap points form a visible scar on the bark, where the old wound has healed.
As the season progresses, the sap, and the syrup, changes character, from light and mild to medium, and eventually, late in the season, yielding the strongest tasting and darkest-amber grade. After that, once the buds start to open, the sap becomes unpalatable and production closes till the next season.
A sugar shack visit during maple syrup season is an annual family outing. It’s a chance to partake of pancakes and a local, seasonal food that is a major part of Canadian culture and cuisine. Maple syrup was also historically important as an anti-slavery alternative to sugar from the sugar cane plantations further south.
Pancaked out, we head home to thaw out and marvel at some statistics. That Canada produces 80 per cent of the world’s maple syrup. That most of it comes from Quebec. That Quebec alone produces nearly 25 million litres of maple syrup a year, equivalent to tapping as many trees. All told, that’s 1,000 million litres of sap each spring, and so important is the product that the province even maintains a “strategic reserve” of maple syrup.
In the country that also gave us the 100-mile diet, it’s especially satisfying to pour syrup from the large jug we bought direct from the farmer up the road, produced in the time-honoured fashion.
Sadly, I doubt the sycamore tree in our Dublin garden produces anything as tasty.