Ramos Tribe Adventures: PRTA: Part 2

Well, we have been collecting, and boiling and Boiling and bottling and learning the DO'S and DON'Ts of Sapping? Syruping? Ok I am not 100% sure of what the official name of what we have been doing but I must tell you it is A LOT of work, A lot of Propane, A lot of sticky and A lot of fun! Here's a run down of what we have been doing since my last post. After tapping the trees, we didn't have the gush of sap we were expecting due to colder weather and then another blizzard.... we seem to get a lot of those up here! But in the last few weeks we have collected gallons and gallons of sap. Though I didn't keep track of how many, just trust me it was a lot of trips around our yard with full buckets in hand. After collecting, we started boiling outside in our giant turkey fryer. Which so far has steamed crabs, lobster and boiled gallons of sap, and only has burnt one turkey. Thankfully it has been more valuable as and "Everything Else" Pot instead of a Turkey fryer! hahaha. And we know that technically, if you were to be real Maple boilers there are hundreds of dollars worth of real, possibly more efficient, ways to boil sap, but as a new comer to the sap industry, we are going with what we have. So turkey fryer it is! After boiling a few days to where the sap was getting thick and more caramel colored, we transferred it to boil over the stove. Now if you don't know why we boil outside, let me tell you. After boiling 100+ gallons of sap in your kitchen, apparently the stickiness causes your paint and wall paper to peel off. Thankfully, others figured this out before we tried it ourselves. Thus the reason you hear about Sugar shacks, which are just that, Shacks built outside to boil your sugar in. We just used our garage. Maybe next year my husband will build me a sugar shack? hahaha A girl can dream... So where was I? Oh yeah, we moved the more condensed sap to the stove because you want to monitor and get the sap to a certain temperature. If you boil over that temp, it will burn leaving your syrup with crystallized sugar in your syrup, boiling under you will have watery syrup. Keith was my official Temp Man. After it reached THE temperature, We bottled it in our pretty Maple Syrup looking bottles. Our first batch was done and we learned a lot with that first batch. Our second batch went a lot better and turned out much better too. Like I said we learned the DO's and DON'Ts. FYI: if you ever make syrup, you need to strain it through a thick cotton like cloth, getting that cloth wet is a MUST! Also temps vary according to altitude. We are almost at sea level so we had to adjust that temp a little. We had some Crystals in our first batch. It's kind of like honey when it Crystallizes. it still tastes great! Guess what we had for Breakfast the next day?.... Yep toast and eggs! Just kidding we had pancakes, IHOP pancakes, which I will put my recipe for that up on my Bundubaking blog soon. Here are the pictures of our first batch.

The pot when transferred to the kitchen