During maple season time everybody chips in because there is lots to do. The air is redolent with sumptuous smells and the mouth waters for maple syrup!
Well if you are curious as to how the syrup is made then do take a trip downtown to Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire where syrup producers will open their sugar houses to offer you a glimpse of the process.
At the Taft’s farm you will get to sample maple syrup, maple fudge, dough nuts topped with homemade maple cream, and maple cotton candy, streaming from a machine.
Maple syrup is a sweetener made from the sap of maple trees. It is most often eaten with pancakes or waffles. It is sometimes used as an ingredient in baking, or in preparing desserts.
Traditionally, maple syrup was harvested by tapping a maple tree through the bark and into the wood phloem then letting the sap run into a bucket; more advanced methods have since superseded this.
To collect the sap, holes are bored into the maple trees and hollow tubes (taps, spouts, spiles) are inserted. Sap flows through the spouts into buckets or into plastic tubing. Modern use of plastic tubing with a partial vacuum has enabled increased production.
A hole must be drilled in a new location each year, as the old hole will produce sap for only one season due to the natural healing process of the tree, called walling-off.
At Taft’s Milk & Maple Farm, it can get pretty crowded in the sugar house during the open house, while Bruce loads wood into the evaporator every eight minutes, checks on the consistency of the syrup, regulates the flow of the sap into the front pan and drains off the finished product into metal buckets.
In Maine, the nation’s No. 2 syrup producer, dozens of sugar house operators will open their doors to the public on Sunday, with some offering pancakes, ice cream and sleigh and wagon rides.
New Hampshire sugar makers will host visitors both Saturday and Sunday. So for a trip that fills your senses and taste, go down the maple syrup road!
Source: USA Today
