well there is this butter pecan syrup that tastes like 1500 dollars and is an orgy to my mouth. We don't have real syrupy connections here.

Gee. I only have some of the fake stuff that I sometimes have a dab of. I usually use honey, clover or orange blossom please.

Sugar is unknown in my pantry any more.

Next time you are driving up north you should pick up a gallon or two. Bee poop is a close second, though.

It's vomit.

bee barf

tasty

My Mom just got some gourmet honey, one that does not crystallize (very strange, and it tastes like butter), because she is in the high-end food business.
I love my Orange Blossom honey, but these... I could get used to, on someone else's dime.

Maple on my morning, or late night, oats with dried cranberries, banana and walnuts... just good!
We like to put yogurt and preserves on ours sometimes. It is very yummy.

I bet I could trade some tree-ripened (not that gassed, tasteless crap you get in your stores) oranges, tangerines and grapefruit for some... hmmmm?

I picked up a qt. at Sam's. Uncle Luke's grade A dark amber. About 9 bucks. I've used cane syrup all my years, and sopping syrup it ain't. Taste good, but too thin. IMHO. Wish I had my 9 bucks back. :bitching:



7

Busterb, all I can say is you'd like honest-to-Pete Grade B syrup better then. Dark Amber doesn't quite get there, though it's not bad either.

My Grandfather used to make maple syrup. One year I helped out. Here are some pictures.

He only had three trees of his own that he could tap, but he knew where all the sugar maple trees in the area were, (this was Wayne County, PA) and he had permission to tap them if he gave the land owners a little of each batch he made. He didn't use gravity fed hoses like the professional operations do. He would do it the old fashioned way. Go out with a bit and brace and drill a hole. Tap the little round plug spigot thing (called a tap?) into the hole and hang the bucket on it. Then you hook the lid on top of that so dirt will stay out of the sap. The sap starts to slowly drip out right away. Each day, the sap will run up the tree to the limbs, and then back down to the roots as it gets cool at night. On each trip, a bunch of it drips into the bucket. You can put a couple of buckets on each tree, but you don't want to do too many, because it will hurt the tree. As the season progresses, the sap that drips out of the bucket gets darker and darker. On a warm day, more sap will drip out, and you might need to empty the buckets twice in one day. On colder days, the buckets might get an inch or so of sap in them. If you go too early in the morning to collect the sap, the buckets have a layer of ice in them, which is a slight hassle because when you dealt with that ice, you'd invariably spill some sap. If you taste the raw sap, it's faintly sweet and has a mild maple syrup flavor.

He'd drive out to the trees in his old Blazer. We'd empty the pails into three old milk pails he kept in the back of the Blazer. They would be heavy after emptying all the pails. Get back to his house, and he had welded together a large (3' x 5') pan that was maybe 6 inches deep. He kept a fire going under this pan the whole season long, and we would just keep adding the new sap to the sap that had been boiling down. The season was a couple weeks long, so he had a big pile of firewood next to that pan that would slowly dwindle.

Once the pan had boiled away like 80% of the water that was in the sap he had collected, he'd pour the sap out of the pan and into a big cast iron pot. This he'd keep on the fire for a while too. Eventually, he would bring the thicker syrup inside into the kitchen. It would be filtered through a big felt cone, and heated up on the stove in a regular pot. Once a candy thermometer said it was the right temperature, he'd pour it into the sterilized mason jars to seal it up.

I forget what the ratio is. Something like 20 gallons of sap boil down into one gallon of syrup. He's end up with a few shelves of his pantry full of maple syrup. This would be passed around to friends, family, and as a gift for hosts when he would visit someone. He also used a lot of it himself.

v. cool. i hope i can remember this when the apocalypse comes.

Wow - that's really cool.
I love the idea of being able to get anything straight from the source.

The most we were able to do close to my parents' house was go blackberrying....

That's it. I'm makin' waffles!

Or, as Fox News refers to it, freedom toast.:cool: