It has been awhile since I’ve posted. It really hit me today when I downloaded Easter photos from my camera. Normally I would just let these pass, but I had to show my friend Rebecca what I made.

I didn’t buy any processed Easter candy this year, but I had fun making these.

I realize compared to my baking friends, this is a beginner’s plate, but hey they still tasted good.

And here’s our basket of colored eggs.

Here at Horse Farm Diaries, we are blessed with a vast wealth of ignorance. This gives us the courage to try things that others, who suffer from ignorance deficit disorder (IDD), might not be willing to try. I am not bragging or anything. Certainly our wealth of ignorance is not world class; for example we could never qualify to be a commentator on Fox news. But for amateurs, we are pretty well off.

Our most recent adventure was to attempt to make maple syrup - without any of the traditional (i.e. effective) equipment; kind of a “what would MacGyver do” (WWMD) if he were trapped behind enemy lines and had a craving for pancakes approach.

There are not many sugar maples in our area. However there are two, conveniently place in our yard. I suspect they were planted there just for syrup. Our thanks goes out to the guy who planted them 20-30 years ago.

Working from first principles, we decided the first thing to do was get the sap out of the trees. We knew the sap needed to be boiled to concentrate it. But since we had boiled other stuff before, we thought, “How hard could that be?”. So we focused on collecting sap.

It turns out that there are these funky taps made especially for tapping maples.

Since we cannot be the only ones around here doing this, I headed to the local farmer’s coop to get some taps.

At the coop, I was helped by a young girl who clearly was suffering from IDD, When I asked if they had such taps, she kind of did one of those “whatta moron” chuckles and said that they just use the plumbing fittings for connecting plastic pipe to plastic tubing. At 23 cents a piece, I decided to give them a try.

I also bought a sweet, tripled fluted drill bit to precisely drill the holes in the tree. All that, with my cordless drill, and I was in business.

Here is a tap in action. The screw above it is to support the weight of the container that catches the sap.

Following in the pioneer tradition, we used plastic milk cartons to collect the sap.

This system worked really well. The cartons were free and easy to clean. There was almost no gap where the spout entered the container, which kept out bugs and other not-so-maple-y stuff. In the end, we had a total of 4 taps, producing about 4 gallons of sap per day.

Time to start boiling. They say you are not supposed to boil sap indoors because your walls get coated with syrup.  That seemed pretty believable to me.  So outside it was.  It would have been great to boil it down over a fire, but the snow had melted, leaving lots of dry grass and leaves. This meant that the fire would have to be tended, and I do not have time for that. So I decided to use the propane grill.

I used a cheap, teflon coated roasting pan for a boiler. It had a large surface area to catch the heat from the burners and to make it easy for the water to evaporate. And if (when) I ruined the pan, it would not be such a loss. Then I ruined the pan.

Gravity is crooked near our grill.  This is no big deal when we are cooking steak. But it is a problem when evaporating sap in a large pan, because part of the pan ends up very shallow while the rest is still deep. When the shallow end approached dryness,  the syrup burned to a crackly black crunch.  Since the pan was teflon coated, there was no way to clean it without destroying it. Time for a new pan and a new plan.

I just recently purchased a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated. This is a great website and the bi-monthly magazine is great reading. I highly recommend it. CI does a lot of equipment reviews. Their reviews of pans are great. In these reviews they subject the pans to insanely brutal treatment. It is amazing that any of them survive. However, every time All-Clad comes out unscathed and on top. We got some All Clad pans as wedding presents. Did I dare use our $200 All Clad pan on the grill? Sure, why not? Over the next several days, I had a few more black charcoal disasters. But the All Clad pan cleaned up great and is no worse for wear.

All was going well,  then the reality of 40 to 1 set in. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make a gallon of maple syrup. We all know what a gallon of milk looks like. Now imagine 40 of them… On a smaller scale, there are 128 fluid ounces in a gallon, so one gallon of sap yields 3.2 ounces of sap.  Here in the stores, maple syrup is sold in 12 ounce containers. So our 4 gallons of sap/day would yield about 1 bottle of syrup. About $10 worth.

It takes a long time to boil off 4 gallons of water on the grill.  It also uses a lot of propane. It got me wondering how much this maple syrup would end up costing. With a little Googling, I found that it takes 10 MJ of energy to evaporate a gallon of water.  A kg of propane releases 46 MJ. A tank of propane is 6.8 kg and costs about $18. This means a tank of propane has about 300 MJ of energy - or enough to evaporate 30 gallons of water - assuming 100% efficiency.  I was thinking maybe I would get about 50% efficiency. But after a few days, it was clear that I was getting about 15% efficiency.  In other words, it was taking about one tank of propane to make one bottle of maple syrup.  I think the syrup was costing me more to make than to buy.

Part of the problem with using propane is that the air flow that is necessary to remove the combustion gases also removes heat. So I looked into using some sort of electric hotplate. This could be insulated so that it would be more efficient.

A kWhr of electric power is the same as 3.6 MJ. Therefore a tank of propane has the same amount of energy as 87 kWhr. We pay 11 cents per kWhr. To get a propane tank worth of energy via electricity would cost about $10 - almost half the cost of propane. If higher efficiency could be obtained, then maybe this would be a reasonable option.

But for this season, I did not want to buy a hotplate. And I did not want to insulate it. I think if I were to put that much thought and  effort in to this, I would put it into building a decent fire pit and burning wood.

Moving along. When is the syrup concentrated enough? Sugar, when it is concentrated enough, prevents the growth of micro-organisms (which cause rotting and fermentation). This means that if you do not concentrate the syrup enough, it will not keep well. But if you overconcentrate it, it crystallizes. There are all sorts of tools for measuring the concentration. I did not have any of them.

But I found, through trial and error (mostly error), that within a period of about 10 minutes the syrup goes from watery to very thick (and it starts to boil over). This seems to be the magic point.  Also, it is possible to freeze maple syrup, so erroring on the the watery side is not so bad.

Once the right concentration is achieved, a sandy grit forms at the bottom of the pan. This stuff really seems like sand. Definitely not something to put on your pancakes. So the last step is to filter the syrup. I used a large funnel that I use for wine making, with cheese cloth packed in the neck. I adjusted the amount of cheese cloth to give a steady trickle of water. Then I filter the syrup when it was very hot.

Here is the result - ready for the freezer:

As for the syrup, I know I am biased, but I think it tastes better than store bought. It turns out that boiling the sap does more than just drive off water. As the students taking Plant Physiology 327 at St John’s University in Minnesota learn -”Maple sap has little maple flavor.  The distinctive flavor of the syrup is caused by the heating which changes certain nitrogenous chemicals in the sap (Kramer, 1983). Part of the flavor of maple syrup is due to vanillin and furanones; the darker the syrup the more the furanones and the stronger the taste.” In other words, they way it is boiled matters.

My boiling process was pretty haphazard. I did not watch the boil close enough in the magical last moments before it got very thick and started to boil over. Carmel is made by heating normal table sugar. I think I got some carmelization of the maple syrup. The taste is very rich and…well… carmel-ly. I like it.

Would I make maple syrup on the grill again? No. It was too much work and too expensive. I am glad I did it, because now I have a much better idea of what is involved. For now, maple syrup might be one of those things that is better left to the professionals.

Aaron turned one and we had a small family gathering. Here he is letting Aunt Nancy how much he likes his new ball.

Happy Birthday to you!

Could anything be better?

It was all worth it.

Some random photos of the day.

Time to say good-bye. Good-bye great grandma.

Just like the horses, the cows enjoy laying in the warm sun on a cold day.

It is a great day to be a cow.

Today we had a record four chicken eggs and one duck egg—all in a variety of sizes. The little egg looks like a first for one of the hens.

Those of you who know Monty, know of his tail.

It is a beautiful silver tail that lays on the ground and gets stepped on when Maddy is asked to back up her horse. Unless Maddy is in a show, this tail is kept under wraps, protected from all of the outside elements.

So, it may come as a shock to many of you that Maddy is cutting Monty’s tail.

From the look on her face, I think she is wondering if she did the right thing.

I think she went a little shorter than she intended. But now she has this magic stuff she’s going to put on his newly trimmed tail so it will grow thicker and longer than ever.

Back to the bathing unit.

Now he’s outside for a wind-dry.

And he still has an amazing tail.

Meet Mr. Rooster. We heard his first cock-a-doodle-do.

Chuck is making a lot of progress with the upper condo. It looks like it will be open for business come egg laying time.

Maddy came home for Kara’s funeral. After the service, the best thing was hanging out with her friend Monty.

May you find a horse to ride in heaven.

Since this is Horse Farm Diaries, I guess I should include a few horse photos. They are doing fine.

Here’s Athena trying to talk to the boys across the way.

They would rather graze in the pasture than talk back.