“Let food be
thy medicine and medicine be thy food” - Hippocrates
Maple syrup
Maple syrup is
not a raw food. It is sugar that has been processed from the sap of
maple trees.
There are
a many types of maple trees, but the most suitable for this industry are
sugar maple, red maple and black maple.
To
over-winter the trees store starch mainly in their roots. In the spring
they draw in huge volumes of water and convert the starch to sugar which
is released into the sap.
The sap
runs up inside the tree in the spring. Generally more sap is produced by
the trees after a cold winter. This has been a problem in recent years,
as the winters haven't been cold enough. This scarcity has pushed the
prices up. It also explains why you will find all kinds of darkened
runny sugars in little maple syrup look-alike bottles on the
supermarket shelves, especially in the run up to pancake day.
Maple sap
is collected from maple trees by running a tap into the tree and either
attaching a line leading off to a collection point, or by placing a
bucket underneath to collect it directly.
The sap is
mostly water. It is boiled to remove most of the water. This may be done
in a modern processing plant as in "How Maple Syrup is Made", or by a
more traditional approach using a wood burning stove as in "Sugar Camp".
The processing is essentially the same.
It takes about 50 volume of sap to yield one volume of maple syrup
by evaporating the water off.
The syrup
is then filtered and hot packed into storage drums.
Later, It
is reheated so that it can be hot packed into retail sized
containers.
Maple sap is about 2% sugar. So if you concentrate
it 50 times you end up with nearly 100% sugar (sucrose) allowing for some
minerals.
Links
"Once the sap has been boiled down it is sent
through a pressure filter to remove the solidified minerals, called sugar
sand. The syrup is then packed into 55-gallon drums for storage. When
packed into retail containers the syrup is reheated to 190°F"
