Foraging For Sugar — Maple Syrup is a Wild Food!
Everyone loves maple syrup. Anyone who says they don’t is lying… or on a diet.
Who can help it? We arrive on earth pre-programmed with a desire for sugar, a remnant survival mechanism from the days before agriculture when we searched the landscape for the precious calories that we needed for life.
Sugar, in all its sweetness, represents a caloric density rare in the wild world. It’s not that carbohydrate is scarce, but rather dense concentrations of simple, sweet carbohydrates are. You’re programmed to gorge on it, the same way hunter-gatherers who acquire honey do. Eat it now, for it’s a transient thing.
But sugar, in the form of sucrose — the same disaccharide that white table sugar is composed of — is found in the late winter sap of maple trees, and with a little human ingenuity can be drawn out, concentrated, and stored as a supreme wild sweetener. It really is a foraged food and you can make it at home!
The science is a little complex, but the practice is simple. In the late winter — here in Maine that used to be the beginning of March, but is now often as early as mid February — when the nighttime temperatures drop below freezing and the daytime temps climb up into the 40’s or higher, pressures in the tree increase forcing the barely sweet sap through the small hole we tap in the tree.
This sap is collected and cooked down through rapid boiling — the ratio is somewhere between 35:1 (35 gallons of sap yields 1 gallon of finished syrup) — eventually yielding that characteristic, caramel-colored viscous liquid we call maple syrup.
To do it at home you need two things. Maple trees (of nearly any variety that will grow to a diameter of 8” or more) and temperature differentials dramatic enough to generate the pressure in the trees that pushes the sap through your spile. If you have those two things, you can make maple syrup!
Even with less than ideal conditions, I manage to make an average of 8 gallons per year, which, despite my sweet tooth, is still more than enough to see me through to the following season. My trees are small, spindly, and sometimes damaged, the remnants of some rather brutish logging that took place here in years past. My equipment is rudimentary, as I’ve chosen a plastic-free operation — carrying my buckets by hand to my evaporator pan. It’s just a small hobbyist set up, but it’s made me sugar self-sufficient for 5 years now, and it is a very welcomed way to end a long winter and usher in the spring.
If you’ve got the trees and the temperatures get out and forage for some sugar! It’s empowering, it’s exciting, and it tastes…. So sweet.
In the above Taste of WildFed video, follow along with Daniel through a maple sugaring season in Maine — from tapping trees in the sugarbush in late winter to canning the finished product in early spring.