Sugaring Off Downtown

A sugar maple is a sugar maple wherever it grows. If it's growing three blocks from Main Street it will still produce sap, which will produced maple sugar, and maple syrup as North End resident Kevin Markowski found out from his neighbor, a Vermont native, who helped Markowski tap a 150 year old maple in his yard. He was surprised how quickly the tree gave off its sugary treasure.

Markowski boiled down several gallons of early sap to make syrup for his family.

At his daughter's birthday party today, he gave away about 5 gallons to give to one of the attendees. When he said he was going to throw the other bucket away, I told him I would take it.

I carted it off in an old pressure cooker pot, which spent the afternoon sitting on my barbecue smoker. Boiling off maple sap water indoor can put so much moisture in the air that wallpaper will fall from the walls.

It boiled for several hours over a wood fire until the pot was black and the syrup brown and condensed. Late-season syrup is darker, and considered a lower grade because the sugars in the sap contain slightly higher levels of fructose and glucose though sucrose is still the main sugar.

I transferred the not-yet-finished syrup into a smaller pot and continued to cook it down. Unfortunately when I drove to Stop and Shop to pick up some cheesecloth for final straining, the remaining syrup cooked down faster than I foresaw, and when I was a block from home Lucy called to tell me that it was burning. She took the pot off the fire, and the syrup was indeed a bit scalded, but salvageable.

I ended up with about eight ounces of thick, amber, smoky-flavored maple syrup, and a few lessons about the nutrition you can find in your own yard.