Sap to Syrup

It was fun.

Jeff's cousin, who lives just down the road from us, tapped some maple trees this year.

Their trees produced well.  Very well.  ;)

So, they called and asked us if we wanted to try boiling sap.

We decided to give it a try.

We started out on the woodstove... but that wasn't hot enough.  So, we moved to the kitchen stove.

That worked, and we got one pint!  :D

They called again and Jeff went and got more sap.  But, I failed.  I was supposed to watch it on the stove, and it got away from me.

But, it wasn't all bad.

It made maple sugar/candy!!  Tastes like the inside of a Crunchie bar.  Yummy.  Really.  So good.  So, not to bad of a mistake after all!

Finally, we decided to boil it outside with the turkey cooker.

That worked the best.  I didn't have the steam in the house, and it was a lot quicker.  But, it sure ate up the propane!

We used almost 30lbs of propane on the last batch!!  Yikes.

If we ever do it again, we'd want to get a woodstove going outside.  It's been too warm lately to really crank up the heat inside, so it wasn't hot enough to boil the sap.

It took about 92 litres of sap to make this:

Now I want pancakes...