Maple syrup harvest
Groundskeeper Lloyd Guindon reports that eight quarts of syrup were produced this year. In February of 2011, Lloyd and grounds assistants Hannah Lord, Amanda Leighton, and Jonathan Bower put 12 taps in four sugar maple trees on the Pendle Hill campus. While it's possible to tap trees other than sugar maples, Lloyd prefers the sugar maples because of the sap's greater sugar content. According to Lloyd, "it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to produce a single gallon of syrup," meaning that Pendle Hill's four tapped trees produced 80 gallons of sap over a four-week collection period.
How did all that sap get turned into syrup? Pendle Hill's grounds crew boiled down the sap in a huge pot over a campfire before taking it indoors, where the cooks created syrup on the kitchen stoves in Main House. It takes patience and caring to do this work - hours and hours of tending the fire to keep a steady boil and then a hawk’s eye in the kitchen to watch for the syrup stage.
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| Albert Sabatini in the kitchen |
In the kitchen the boiled-down sap is strained into a stainless steel pot and cooked over medium high heat. As the sap is further reduced to syrup, there are two ways to reach the finished product. A candy thermometer can be used to catch the temperature between 190 and 200 degrees. Albert says the five minutes before reaching this temperature are critical: “Miss it and you’ve got burned sugar!” Alternatively, the seasoned cook can leave the thermometer in the drawer and “read” the stickiness and slow roll of the syrup off the spoon.
| Maple Trees being tapped for sap |
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Pendle Hill has been producing maple syrup for decades. Naturalist Ewell Gibbon, author of Stalking the Wild Asparagus, worked at Pendle Hill in the late 1950s. Legend has it that he blackened the kitchen walls during his maple syrup boil-downs!
As Lloyd points out, "Homemade maple syrup is a special treat for late winter residents at Pendle Hill." To get the sap from the trees, you need nights when the temperature is below freezing and days which are well above the freezing mark. And syrup this good disappears fast!