I make my BBQ rubs with real maple sugar, better than anything you can get from the store.
|
   
   
|
|
I make my BBQ rubs with real maple sugar, better than anything you can get from the store.
Yes, it brings back many memories. I wonder - does anyone here reading this have experience in a small commercial operations? Like, how to lay out plastic lines, correct size, etc etc source of same CHEAP ! I have a potential site that would tap maybe 200 trees and gravity feed to one location. There is no money in making maple syrup, today, but maybe in the not so distant future.
Ahhh, how I miss the days when I ate carbs. I've been in ketosis for over 1.5 years now and I still crave them. But as someone else already wrote, I can taste it in my mind. I really like grade B.
Today the closest I can come to real maple syrup is my homemade syrup made with no carb sweetener and fake maple flavor on my low carb pancakes.
I cant imagine tapping 200 trees and the storage and pile of wood or LP to cook it down.
A couple years ago I tapped 10 trees and I had to set up two Turkey cookers and buy a bunch of buckets and plastic food grade bushel baskets to hold the sap till it was cooked down. I made 5 1/2 gallons of syrup from the 10 trees and I pulled the spiles and plugged the holes early.
I usually only use 3 or 4 trees, this year I have 3 that are running one is still dry so I tapped a 4th and I will stop next weekend.
This year the sugar is high and it's turning out a pint using 5 gallons sap and it's super flavorful and sweet.
I did a lot as a kid growing up. My father did small commercial quantities. He is long gone as are the sugar house-burned by hoodlums- along with two old school evaporators, storage tanks, mountains of cream pails, etc etc. I have one big evaporator left. It could be gravity feed. Anything can be burned to boil it, so not outrageous. I have a cousin who is Canadian. He claims his family is in it. They have a 3 years supply on hand, as of last Thanksgiving. There ain't no money it, yet..
One run of 1/2 poly tube would be fine for 200 taps, running down hill. I had three blue 90 gallon juice jugs steam cleaned and bleached clean for storage. We were on a hillside so everything siphoned down hill, spiels to storage to pan to finishing kettle. Squirrels would chew through the tubes, squirrels are easy to fix. I sugared Friday afternoons to Monday mornings tending the rig every four hours, moving sap from the front pan to the rear pan, and stoke up a roaring stovefull. I found that an old battery tester would work for syrup, hot sap floating three balls was time to finish with a candy thermometer, every week was a gallon to finish or more. My neighbor was fine with me dragging deadfall out of the woods to burn for syrup. My improvement on Rink Mann's barrel arch is to bolt another barrel end to end to it, use the front barrel (wrapped in three loose turns of aluminumfoil for insulation) for a stove with a good barrel stove door on it, and an 8 inch stovepipe ten feet tall on the end of the arch for draft. I finished syrup on the front stove: hammered a flat spot in it. Also made tea.
When not in use all summer the two bolted together barrels hung from a hook in back of the garage
I used an old furnace plenum for a house shaped pan cover kept the wind and rain and smoke off the pans. And a tarp to keep the rain off me and the dog and kids. The whole rusty thing looks a bit silly up on rocks in a sea of mud killing the lawn. I gave quart Ball jars of clear syrup away for Christmas, and what else is there to do before iceout in NH?
Rink Mann's book shows an excellent automatic pan feeder that costs a nickle, works well.
If you Google reverse osmosis maple syrup you will find a homemade $300 rig to make 5% sap, saving fuel. The pros use RO designed for syrup, that's how they make very clear syrup, boiling darkens sugar, dirty pans darken sugar, end of run sap makes dark syrup. For me, I like dark syrup. Clearer fetches more money.
Women don't much like this hobby, but the dog had fun.
Yer gonna burn yerself, syrup is past scalding. And do not ever boil sap in the house!
Yes, but it sure makes it smell good.Originally Posted by .429&H110
I like mine dark also. Those three jars in my photo the far left is what I get in the final cook down. I use large glass pots for the final and the left jar is what I get with 228º with my trees. 229º I will get sugar when it cools. 231º crystal clear rock candy.
Boil in the house, yer gonna have more ants than you can kill.
The sugar steam coats everything. House become ant bait.
Up in the Vermont hills I had a propane account that found a 100psi steam boiler in the dump, was a cast-off from a drycleaners shop. They welded up some steam pans, I had to teach them how steam traps work. Boiling on steam is a great idea but that boiler was scary. I predicted they would soon be in orbit, but they liked the rig so well they built a real water tube boiler fired under traditional pans. The steam pans were great for finishing because steam pressure is temperature and vice versa. They burned a lot of propane made a lot of syrup.
Go gas, go Boom.
Being a retired Plumber I have worked on my share of them as heating systems, steam and hot water but not for cooking down sap.
Put a high pressure steam boiler together and run the tubes through a large tank heating the sap might be more efficient than a gas fire under the tank like the bootleggers use.
With a high pressure steam boiler getting 300 degree steam is not a problem but you better understand them because they run with more than 12 lbs head pressure or you will see them shaking like a scared dog and rumbling like thunder through the hills.
Rink Mann's book showed me how the hammer-bend mild steel into two pans, folded up. The mild steel warped easily so the pans had birch dowels pounded in diagonally. Worked fine. If you direct fire on mild steel the sap will caramelize. Thick stainless steel, as a commercial pan stays cleaner cleans easily but is mighty expensive with a month of welding in them. Direct fired burning wood makes smoke and ash that must be kept away from the syrup. I set up an arch for a commercial sugarhouse that had the first Riello burners I had ever seen: six oil burners under a large stainless pan three gallons an hour each. That's a lot of oil in a month.
I tapped my 3 maples this morning. Sap started running out almost as soon as I pulled the drill out.
My great aunt and uncle boil in an old stainless lard trough from a hog processing plant that closed years ago. They cook it over a wood fire in an old tractor rim. They have a plastic barrel strapped to a little trailer behind their atv and we’d drive around the woods and dump the buckets into the barrel. Been a few years since I’ve been up to help but I really enjoyed it.
Just opened our last gallon jar, three days ago. We get 6 gal from a local sapper mail half away throughout the year to friends. Was looking up sugar facts and the real stuff has a glycimic index around 55 cane sugar is high 60's. Every once in a while I'll pour a few ounces in a glass and sip it between sips of bourbon.
FWIW, I got almost 10 gallons of sap out of my 3 trees, in less than a day. Hope that keeps up.
It finally warned up enough that the spiles didn't freeze, it's late this spring and the flows are up and down but my first final cook down turned to heavy sugar at 228º when I took it off the fire so this second CD I took off at 223º when I dipped the spoon in the hot pot to sample it.
Letting it cool it took a couple licks to get the spoon clean off
The Syrup is extra sweet and very good tasting. Maybe it's because of the clod below zero freezing temperatures we had till about a 1 1/2 weeks ago making the run late but it sure was worth waiting for it.
I fed four kids syrup on waffles (or pancakes) for breakfast eight years.
The youngest is 6'8"... YMMV.
My favorite memory is cold sap and SouthernComfort in a cloud of steam.
Maple Comfort.
Don't burn yourself. Lord knows I did.
.429, getting burned is all part of the game.
And then I bought her a new microwave...
Posting Permissions
| BP | Bronze Point | IMR | Improved Military Rifle | PTD | Pointed |
| BR | Bench Rest | M | Magnum | RN | Round Nose |
| BT | Boat Tail | PL | Power-Lokt | SP | Soft Point |
| C | Compressed Charge | PR | Primer | SPCL | Soft Point "Core-Lokt" |
| HP | Hollow Point | PSPCL | Pointed Soft Point "Core Lokt" | C.O.L. | Cartridge Overall Length |
| PSP | Pointed Soft Point | Spz | Spitzer Point | SBT | Spitzer Boat Tail |
| LRN | Lead Round Nose | LWC | Lead Wad Cutter | LSWC | Lead Semi Wad Cutter |
| GC | Gas Check |
Reply With Quote