The holes go waist-high on the western side, which receives more sun and delivers more sap. I sink two taps with a rubber mallet. I reserve a third in case one dries up. Immediately the juice starts running, dribbles to the metal lip, and trembles in the sunlight before falling into the bucket with a flat plunk. It seems impossible that I’ll empty these buckets twenty, thirty times, but I will.
The sap, when I lift a drop to my lips, tastes of the purest, cleanest water.
2. First Haul
The first day is always a good run, the tree primed like a well-oiled pump, and when I walk outside at four o’clock, I can’t believe my eyes: the buckets are half full. If I don’t get started on a boil now, I’ll be up all night. I pour the two buckets into one and pour that into a heavy stockpot on the strongest burner. Fire it up. Walk away.
In thirty minutes, the sap will boil. A layer of scum needs to be skimmed off the top.
In three hours, the sap reduces by half. The kitchen smells honeyed. The brew in the pot is the color of light beer.
In four hours, it needs to be transferred to a wider, shallower pot, filtered again, and re-boiled.
In five hours, the kitchen smells of vanilla. There may be almonds, honey, butter, or hazelnuts, too, depending upon the year. There’s surprisingly little “maple” flavor. The poet-friend accurately compared maple syrup made from one tree to single-malt Scotch.
Then the syrup begins to foam in the pot with a tidal fizzing. I must watch it carefully now, observe how it coats a spoon. There are instruments, hydrometers and thermometers, but I don’t do precision. This explains why, although I’m a good cook, I’m a miserable baker—I can’t be bothered, even though I know better.
How close to disaster do I want to ride? The longer the boil, the more intense the flavors, but if I push too far, the syrup will harden when it cools. I’ll have to chip the crystals out of the jar with a fork and suck on the shards.
It’s late. The dog chases footballs in his sleep, his nails clicking on the floor. My wife’s knitting needles tap. I’m tired, so I kill the burner and pour the syrup into a clean ramekin. There’s no need to sterilize a jar. This stuff won’t make it to morning.
Recipe for First-Boil Syrup
Ingredients:
As much maple syrup as you just made
A spoon
A ramekin or small bowl
A partner, if you’re the generous type, in which case you’ll need two spoons and ramekins
In the steamed-over windows and soft light, pour the limpid syrup into the ramekin and eat it still warm. Close your eyes. Marvel at the power of nature, wonder at the Indians who were first bored or desperate or clever enough to boil down tree-water for a whole day just to see what happened. Who the hell does that? You’re in their debt. Taste honey, vanilla, floral notes. Feel the back of your throat burn with the sweetness of winter’s end.
Go ahead, make yourself sick. Pancakes? Overrated and too much trouble.
If you have an embarrassment of riches, pour the warm syrup over vanilla ice cream. But just how much syrup would that be, though?
And look—it’s already gone.
3. Doubters
Even up here, in the heart of the country, they exist. Like this one: sixty-something, windbreaker, her pant cuffs stained by puddle-splash. Dogless. I’ve never seen this snow troll before, and I wonder what thawed snowbank she’s crawled out of. She looks at me kind of walleyed as I’m at the end of my driveway collecting sap one week into the season.
“You’re not boiling that inside your house, are you?”
“Why?”
“It’ll take your wallpaper right off. It’ll turn your walls yellow.”
We’ve been home-making maple syrup for three years now, and we have had zero wall-issues. But we don’t have wallpaper. After stripping nearly all that came with our house, we have unflattering things to say about people who do have wallpaper. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman nailed it. I once called the stuff The Official Decorating Choice of Hell. After fifty-some boils, my kitchen walls are still white. True, the exhaust fan over the stove burned up in the middle of last season, but that could have been anything—a faulty part, spiders in the wiring, or, most likely my aggressiveness in general as a cook. I love heat. Sear is one of my favorite verbs, smoke point one of my favorite temperatures. I revel in culinary accelerants: brandy, amaretto, oil, chili paste. There is often fire—intentionally. The hiss of deglazing makes me hoot. I’ve been meaning to replace that exhaust hood, but electrical wiring is not my forte, and what are windows for? It’s 44 degrees already, after all.
I pity this woman and all of her kind. She appears unaware that nothing great ever gets made the easy way.
4. Regarding the Holes in the Tree
They cannot be plugged up. Not with old wine corks, not with DAP, not with cement, rubber or real. Once I’ve drilled them, the sap won’t stop flowing for a month. I won’t stop boiling until the yield is so low that it’s no longer worth the trouble. Unless I’m using all of those hours while the stove steams to build a time machine that will enable me to go back two weeks and not pick up that drill, I’m in it for the duration.
I know this in theory, but on days when I have other things to do, because I’m running a typical household, not a sugarbush, it will seem as if that maple tree is cranking out liquid just to spite me. On a good day the buckets fill several times, and I pour them into a 5 gallon water cooler barrel. One barrel is about eight hours’ boiling with all the burners running, meaning that night dinner will be Thai takeout, or Mexican, or cheese and fruit, but never out at a restaurant, because only a fool would walk away from a kitchen with that much fire pouring out of it. I’d like to expedite the process, but that seems begging for trouble.
Just yesterday I heard about someone on the other side of town who burned his garage down while trying to do a boil in—of all things—a turkey fryer. He had too much sap and he needed to raise the temperature fast, apparently.
These are my people. Sort of.
5. A Steep and Slippery Slope
Meaning both downward and upward. Downward in the sense that after only one season, let alone several, you can never go back. Log Cabin, Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth, anything that comes in a plastic jar or, Godhelpus, a tiny rectangular pack from Kraft with a peel-away top—it’s criminal. I’ll pay extra for a vial of the real stuff if I have to, though in northern New York we have syrup like the Gulf has shrimp, so it often comes for free. A year we lived in western Pennsylvania stands out as one of the darkest in my life for many reasons, not the least of which is the crap they expected you to dump on your pancakes.
And upward, in the sense that someone always seems to have a better setup. Like a friend who taps his maples and his black walnut tree. One year I finally got my hands on a jar of his black walnut syrup, trading it, I’m sad to say, for some amateurish bottles of homebrewed beer I’d made. Not even the guilt of sticking it to him could keep my brain from lighting up in neon—black walnut syrup is earthy, sweet, nutty-green, with the texture of molasses. I took a walk through our tiny village lot after pouring the syrup on oatcakes as he’d recommended, hoping to find that I’d mistaken a walnut tree for a scrub pine. Thwarted, I surveyed the treeline for anything else that could be tapped. What about that tree over there? Or that one? Arborvitae sap? Yellow birch? Why not? People have gotten themselves killed this way, I’m certain.
6. Potential
March is the time of the year for maple festivals, where you can watch what the big boys do and sample all sorts of maple products. We’ve never been. We have our own maple festival nonstop for several weeks, and we seem to invent a new product every day. Of course there are the usual suspects: pancakes, waffles, French toast, regular toast with a small beaded drizzle in the butter; but we also pour the syrup over ice cream, into ice cream, and can make sorbets and gelatos; use it in place of sugar in breads, cakes, and cookies; in homemade barbeque sauce, salad dressing, and mayonnaise; as a
background to sauteed Thai chiles, pad Thai, and other stir fries; with fruit, yogurt, Kefir; alone, out of the jar, like a shot of whiskey on a rough day; shot with whiskey, like a sweet boiler-maker, on a rougher day; as a glaze for chicken, salmon, pork, and shrimp; over oatmeal, with cinnamon and nutmeg; in a pan sauce, like Madeira; in place of honey with strong cheeses. The limits are your own apprehensions and the amount you’re willing to risk wasting should the flavors fall into dissonance. The only way I haven’t had it is as the Canadians do, dumped into a pile of clean snow on a cutting board outdoors and stirred up with a stick, then eaten, communally, with a spoon.
7. Gifts
Whether any recipient of DIY maple syrup knows it or not, the value of the gift is always high, might be called equal in dollars to the yield in ounces squared (at least), where yield is the product of a completely idiosyncratic and therefore unpredictable product of temperature, time, and sugar level. I don’t know a damn thing about higher mathematics, but it seems chaos theory might be useful here.
What I do know is that most maple producers say 40 gallons of sap yields an average of 1 gallon of Grade-A syrup. Our numbers may be higher early on, lower a little later. We’ll put up 1 gallon or so a year, spread across an oddball collection of jam, jelly, sauce, mason, and other jars. Some jars, the best, we’ll mark with smiley faces, a special cache.
I give jars away reluctantly, and only after attempting to verify that Aunt Jemima is nowhere on the recipient’s premises, the apparition of her broad-shouldered, placating form in a kitchen cabinet being, like wallpaper, deeply revealing in a number of ways.
8. Anxiety and Its Cure
You begin anticipating the temperature and then move to obsessing over the temperature. The end can come quickly, and not always predictably. One week the temperatures hold steady in the 40s during the day, maybe toeing 50 as if considering the idea, and then one afternoon the wind shifts and the mercury shoots into the 60s. You can recover from only one 60 degree day, but not three or four. It doesn’t matter if the temperatures drop again; the syrup will be thinner, the taste not as complex, suitable for baking, perhaps, but barely. In a good year there are two or three weeks in the forties and you can see the warm-up coming. I hate to curse the spring, but I’m never ready to let go unless the season has been so good that the tree has bullied me to exhaustion. I always want just one more jar socked away for August, when the blueberries are as deep as the January snows, and for January mornings, when the snows themselves are deep and we self-medicate with elaborate breakfasts of French toast and local bacon.
But the season does end, of course. It must. The arrival of the bees in April tells you all you need to know. One day they just appear around the buckets, a little drunk on the sunlight, circling wildly, too drowsy to sting. The rest of the run is theirs. If you keep collecting and boiling, you’re only the fox from Aesop. I grab the pliers and pull out the taps, dropping them into the bucket with a bittersweet, metallic clank. The sap begins weeping down the trunk of the tree, staining the sidewalk.
Inside, I count the final take, squirreling away jars in various cabinets and corners of the kitchen and pantry so we can forget and rediscover them one night in November. The next season seems a long way off, but now, standing in the sunlight, it’s easy to idealize the winter that must come first. Spring will atone for ending the boils with wild leeks and mushrooms in May. Not too long after, there will be garlic and strawberries. Then tomatoes, and watermelons, and winter squash. You can play your favorites, and we do, but the truth is that it’s never too far to the next good thing.
SNOWVILLE CREAMERY HAS A MODEST GOAL: SAVE THE WORLD
By Eric LeMay
From Edible Columbus
Poet, essayist, writing teacher, webmaster Eric LeMay—author of Immortal Milk: Adventures in Cheese—pursues his longtime obsession with dairy products from his home in Athens, Ohio.
Pouring milk from Snowville Creamery feels blissful. When you pick up the carton, you’re greeted by a lovely dairymaid who seems to embody the countryside, with its green pastures and rustic fences. She wears a white fluffy bonnet and wholesome dress. At her bosom, she cradles a pitcher, as though she were Mother Earth pouring out the milk of human kindness. Behind her, the sun rises, encircling her with its hopeful glow.
This is milk made mythic, and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to meet Warren Taylor, owner of Snowville Creamery. The other is the milk itself, which is thick and frothy and delicious. The first time I tried it, I drank a quarter of a gallon, glass after glass. I thought it was a milkshake.
How, I wondered, did a small diary nooked in the hills of Southeast Ohio produce milk this good? Who was this man behind the maid?
Now, having spent some time with Warren, I see that maid differently: She’s wearing a red bandana around her forehead and raising a revolutionary fist in the air. She’s marching down Independence Avenue, passing out leaflets on the dangers of genetically modified foods and hydraulic fracturing. And she’s smiling, because she’s looking forward to a fight. She’s going to take on huge corporations who want to strip our food of its nutrients and flavor. She supports our local businesses serving our local communities. She wants our kids drinking healthy milk from healthy cows raised on a healthy soil.
“Love your food,” she cries. “Love each other.”
She wants us to join a revolution.
“This isn’t about this,” says Warren.
We’re outside, standing on the slope of a hill, looking up at what’s essentially a pole barn. It’s the milk plant that Warren designed from the ground up, and he’s telling me how it takes advantage of gravity: Every time Snowville processes and packages milk, they have to flush the plant’s metal pipes with hot water and cleaner. This happens multiple times and generates waste. Thanks to the hill, however, this waste funnels down into a huge tank on the plant’s lower level. But then what? You’ve still got to deal with hundreds of gallons of cleaner-filled wastewater. Turns out that Warren uses cleaners that are different from those used in most dairies. His contain nitrogen and potassium hydroxide.
“And you know what those are, don’t you?” he asks.
I don’t. I don’t know 1% of what Warren knows about dairy. Luckily, Warren gets a kick out of teaching it. He has a catchy “Isn’t this so cool?” vibe about him, even when he’s describing chemical cleaners.
“Fertilizer!” he booms, nodding toward a nearby field where cows graze. In the distance, an unassuming sprinkler spritzes the grass.
Gradually, I get it: That’s the wastewater. “Instead of contaminating the water supply,” says Warren, already moving on, “we’re nourishing the soil.”
I’m hustling after him, trying to keep up, as I fit this latest information into my growing picture of the plant. So far I’ve learned about
•The genetic makeup of the 260 cows that provide Snowville with their milk. They’re Jersey, Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Milking Shorthorn, Friesian and Holstein, all intermixed by years of cross-breeding. They’re heartier and give healthier milk than the huge Holsteins that are confined on most dairy farms.
•The grazing practices used to feed the herd, which rotate through many different pastures rather than remaining confined to one, so that the cows can rebuild the topsoil instead of depleting it.
•The minimal amount of processing Snowville does to its milk, which leaves the milk’s nutrients and flavor intact rather than pasteurizing and homogenizing them out of existence.
•The eco-friendly and taste-preserving cartons in which Snowville packages its milk. And the delivery schedule—from cow to store in less than 48 hours—that keeps its milk so fresh.
And that’s just what I’ve managed to scribble down, because Warren is now detailing the spatial layout of the plant. Its core, where the raw milk goes from storage tanks to finished cartons, takes up only 600 square feet, which saves space, energy and money.
“So what is this about?” I finally get to ask. I can’t imagine p
utting so much care into creating a milk plant that isn’t about milk.
“This,” says Warren, “is about building a canoe. This is about where you go with it and what you do with it.”
A canoe seems a bizarre metaphor for a milk plant, but I press on. “What do you want to do with it?”
Warren doesn’t hesitate: “Save the world.”
Save the world? With milk? The idea sounds absurd, the sort of thing proclaimed by a zealot or a madman. That absurdity isn’t lost on Warren.
“I’m hoping to be the Che Guevara of dairy,” he says.
And sure enough, on the flipside of his business card, hiding behind that milkmaid, is a smiling Che. There’s also a quote: “The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” Che isn’t Warren’s only guiding spirit; you can add John the Baptist and Neal Cassady.
“And what about that milkmaid?” I ask.
“That’s not me,” says Warren, throwing a friendly, quit-messing-with-me elbow into my chest. “I’m the Hunter S. Thompson of dairy.”
Warren grins when he says stuff like this—it’s not every dairyman who compares himself to a Marxist revolutionary, a religious prophet, a psychedelic muse and an antiauthoritarian wild man—but his eyes have an edgy gleam. He’s not joking. He’s got the messianic, near-manic glow of a visionary, because he has a vision: This small milk plant in Pomeroy, Ohio, is going to spark an international movement of social justice.
Best Food Writing 2012 Page 7