Where is the maple syrup?
 

This ante meridian, the afflicted requested smoothies. Usually made with yogurt, strawberries, bananas, a dash of vanilla, and maple syrup. After hunting high and low, I could not find the syrup so I substituted with honey.

I had a feeling the inch was behind the disappearance and I taxed him with it, but he just gave pale green blank looks.

Later, CustomG found the gallon of maple syrup behind a living room chair.

Mom: Did you put this behind the chair?
Inch: Yes.
Dad: Is that your own personal supply?
Inch: Yes.

could be cross posted with funny things they do/say.

When I was 5, I was so in love with syrup that on two different occasions I walked straight into neighbor's houses and broke into their fridges to have a gulp.

keep your doors locked, the weird next-door kid is on a sugar high again

Is it 'real' maple? Good syrup is hard to find. I am not even sure if 'Log Cabin' still makes theres with 3% maple. It's all sugar and flavoring.:mad:

Try Grade B maple. It knocks the socks off of Grade A -- it's a lot stronger tasting, and great for baking and desserts. :yum:


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I have always thought syrup was one of the most disgusting things ever. The only thing worse is syrup on French toast. :greenface

When they fucked with the stoned kids made that whole movie worth it... it was beautiful. Notice most of that scene is in the trailer.
My father has a maple syrup habit. I'm 1/2 afraid to use it because I have a theory that it is addictive and a narcotic based on his behavior.

mmmmm :yum:


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There's something about this that seems so cruel. I know it's just a tree!

Is it real? That's right up there with "I think I had an orgasm."

We live in Maple country. I think there is a fifteen hundred dollar fine for having fake syrup in your house. Around here we know the syrup makers personally and go to the syrup orgy each year when the sap starts running. We're hooked up.

Maple syrup is very expensive over here. Even the imitation stuff. We don't grow maple trees here much though, so maybe that's why...

Mostly what's in our shops comes from Canada.

how about tea tree oil? and eucalyptus? not for pancakes, but as a sort of "hostage sap exchange program."

People around here pay insane prices for tea tree oil and they slather it on anything even remotely inflamed. I bet per gallon you get more.

Around here, Grade B which is what most people use, (A being extremely sweet and having a very 'clear' or simple flavor, B having more complexity and stronger tree like flavor) goes for about $25-35 gallon on the farm. Higher in stores. A goes for almost twice that price. It is really good though.

We have lots of tea tree oil products over here and people do put it on bites and cuts etc, but not all that much. You don't need to slather it though. Just a touch is enough.

Over here for authentic maple syrup (don't know what grade it would be) we have to pay about $12 for 300ml which is about a cup full.

Well, if you buy it by the cup here it can get pretty steep, maybe 5 or 6 bucks. How many Ozzie dollars to a US dollar anyway?

Thought about an import biz?

80 au cents to a US dollar

Sugar maples need a snowy winter, and the Ozzies just plain aren't in the right latitudes for the climate band sugar maples are adapted to.

I'm kind of surprised the Russians don't grow any. They've got deciduous forest.

The grade will be given on the bottle. Grade B runs darker color than Grade A of any variation, which tends toward the colors of blend whisky, or of rums. Whenever possible, B is what I get.

Fobble, that's... awfully strange. French toast is about my favorite, and real maple syrup surely satisfies the palate as no other attempt at syrup does.

Now what Australians do with pancakes is pretty novel in American eyes -- one bright day in Perth W.A. I had beef potpie all over a short stack of pancakes for lunch.

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:

(Rich, wrt another thread, how's that rotisserie working now?)

This year the Maple Syrup is in;
Vermont............460k gallons
Maine...............300k gallons
New York..........253k gallons
Wisconsin..........100k gallons
Michigan.............78k gallons
Ohio...................78k gallons
Pennsylvania........66k gallons
New Hampshire.....64k gallons
Massachusetts.....40k gallons
Connecticut.........10k gallons