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MAKING MAPLE SUGAR

December 11, 2020

MAKING MAPLE SUGAR

Maple Sugar is very popular at the farm markets and on the website. 


We start with 5 quarts of light maple syrup in a big stainless-steel pot, the wider the pot the faster the syrup will come to temperature. 

 

The prep work is simple, set up for convenience and safety, we handle syrup at 261 degrees to accomplish the goal. We use a high-grade cooking thermometer as the temperature is very important. 

After you make sugar a couple of hundred time you can get an idea d the temperature by the size of the bubbles as the syrup heats to 261 degrees. 

The temperature to finish depends on your location and the boiling temperature of water at your elevation. You adjust the finishing temperature accordingly. Before we had 20-C kitchen on the homestead we used a different location where water boiled at 213 degrees, so we had to adjust accordingly. 

Water boils at 211 degrees in our kitchen, the texture we like occurs at 60 degrees above the boiling temperature of water. 

Once the syrup reaches 261 degrees, we very carefully pour the syrup into the paddle machine. The machine spins and the paddles stir the syrup. As you can see in the photos the fast stirring at this temperature causes the liquid still in the syrup to evaporate. The vapor coming of the syrup is extremely hot. 

As the process of evaporation occurs the syrup granulates. We then take the sugar and place on large baking trays to cool. 

 

 


Once cooled we push the sugar thru a stainless-steel screen which allows the sugar to pass thru and the maple rocks and lumps are removed. 

We also offer the maple rocks at the market, folks like to put them in their tea and coffee, the smaller rocks are ice cream topping. 

We offer pure maple and flavored maple sugar such as cinnamon and vanilla. We offer maple zest which is sugar and ground importee peppercorns and a touch of orange zest. A new sugar we started this past summer is smoked maple sugar. You find those items in our online store in the Maple Pantry section! Yum!