So much for sugaring season.
All that excellent advice from my homestead and permaculture garden books telling me to keep herbs and plants I’ll use most frequently closest to my kitchen door wasn’t meant to apply in February. But this year, thanks to catastrophic climate change tipping points, I had a near-endlessly replenishing bucket of maple sap six booted steps from my back door starting at the end of January. It kept going right up until all the parks departments and conservation orgs around here started advertising their sugaring events. By the time those events rolled around, the season was on its last legs.
It was more than a little startling, even though I already knew how extraordinary this winter was going to be. The environmentalist PR machine turns more slowly than the climate.
Lucky me, I got a boost. I wouldn’t have had my spile in so early if I hadn’t heard some local Detroit native and Indigenous urban farmers talking about adapting to extreme seasonal variation at an OU event last fall. I’m very grateful. Last year I didn’t hardly get any sap at all.
I’ve been tapping this tree a few years. But I’ve never really done the traditional sugaring process. It just seems like too much energy expenditure for too little payoff. To make maple syrup from sap, you’ve got to reduce its volume by a factor of 20. In preindustrial times, this made sense: you were concentrating your sugar into a form that would keep while simultaneously keeping your people warm in the cold, something you’d have had to do anyway. These days, unfortunately, heating, food preservation, and cooking have been logically separated by infrastructure decisions that mass production and matters of scale make very hard to renegotiate. I could turn off my heat while I’m sugaring, rely just on the heat from the stove, but then my house will have been heated with free-range water vapor when it could be heated by steam neatly trapped within radiators. I’ve thought about boiling maple sap instead of water in my home furnace, using the generated steam in my radiators and getting delicious maple sugar as a byproduct, but I don’t have the engineering nor the fabrication skills.
So I experiment with other, more efficient, hopefully as delicious ways to use maple sap.
I’m in pursuit of those pieces of lost culture, the old, discarded interconnections which once made us more like all the other living things on earth we now distance ourselves from so much by default. I don’t want to do it just for aesthetics or out of nostalgia. I want to make it work for us. I want to reintegrate with these natural cycles to learn, to rediscover what drew us to integrate with them in the first place, and to hopefully set an example that such reintegration, which is going to be essential to these coming decades and centuries of climate adaptation for our species, is possible, and can be a joy, not a hardship.
Is the sap running? Well, you’d better go and catch it!
Tapping is easy. All you need is a hardwood tree (birch, walnut, maple) more than a foot in diameter, a $5 spile, a drill with a 1/4” bit (go in about an inch and a half, that’s plenty), a sturdy food grade vessel with a bit of clothesline or something to secure it in place, and a stretch of days in which the temperature fluctuates above and below freezing.
The tree is for the most part unharmed, as long as it’s big enough. But I worry about mine anyway and go far gentler on it than I’m advised I could be. It’s a beautiful sugar maple, we ask so much of it, we climb it and swing from it, it shelters us and cools the climate and feeds us—the parallels to a certain children’s book are unavoidable, and I want to do better than that.
Sap comes out of the tree sterile. And filtered. Few purer things in this world than maple sap until it touches bark or human lips. Still, they tell you not to drink it raw. Guess who does anyway, but do as I say not as I do for your own safety, please. Also, uncooked, it definitely does not keep. A few days at room temperature, and maple sap starts to smell like moldy cheese. But there’s so much to do with it, so much that is delicious and rewarding, just by cooking it a little, enough to kill whatever groggy ants fell in the bucket while the sap was running high.
Below we have some recipes. The rule of thumb is: anywhere you’d use water to cook and might enjoy a little sweetness in the end result. Every year, I struggle at first, I look at my notes, I remember how this works. Then I get into a routine. I start to push boundaries and try new things, some of which fail. But I learn. And I miss it when it’s over.
Maple Sap Sumacade
- 1 quart maple sap
- 3 or 4 dried sumac drupes
- optional 1/4 oz crushed dried coriander, allspice, anise or other seeds
Sumacade is Anishinaabe in origin as I understand it, though it’s also a thing in Lebanese cooking apparently? It was an institution here in Michigan for a good while both before and after colonization and immigration, it seems like, though I don’t know anybody else who makes it now. “Drupes” is a cool word—that’s the clusters of fuzzy red berries. They’re sour, fruity, a bit nutty, and they’re still on the trees in February in some places where the birds haven’t found them. I went out and picked some and steeped them in maple sap just brought to a boil with a few crushed allspice berries. I don’t know if that part is canon; I do it because I’m influenced by ponche de jamáica and I like it. Let it cool completely and then strain and drink over ice. I also really like it hot; it’s got vitamin C, it’s nice for a cold.
Maple Ponche de Jamáica
- Small handful of dried hibiscus flowers
- Three crushed allspice berries
- 1 qt maple sap
Normally I’d use honey, but the maple sugar covers that. Bring almost to a boil in a small saucepan. Liquid should turn a delicious dark red. Strain out the bits and drink hot or chilled over ice.
Maple Café de Olla
- 20 oz maple sap
- 1/4 cup coarsely ground coffee
- 1/2 stick cinnamon
- 1 fairly substantial curl of orange rind
A treat I have enjoyed in Guatemala and Mexico. I put the cinnamon and orange rind right in our french press with the coffee, and at all other times of the year but this, include a tablespoon of dark brown sugar. The maple sap is milder and goes great with milk.
Maple Sap Sourdough
Ferment a sponge using sourdough starter overnight with maple sap instead of water. The yeast, in my experience, loves the extra sugar in the sap, resulting in a faster rise and near-criminally rustic crumb.
Maple Sap Beer
“Best beer I ever made.”
—My cousin Matty.
Beer is the best way to use up a ton of sap at the peak of the season. One five-gallon batch will easily consume eight gallons of sap, since the hopping process involves an hour-long boil. I’ve done maple stouts, porters, brown ales, a pale ale, and this year I am waiting patiently for a maple sap spruce tip IPA to mature. I tried cooking down sap to use instead of a dextrose priming solution at bottling time, but couldn’t get the specific gravity quite right and ran out of patience.
Other Stuff
If you’ve got C02 and a keg, you can fill it with maple sap and have maple sap seltzer; the CO2 preserves it longer than it would last exposed to oxygen, though not forever. You can braise greens in maple sap; I’ve done collards, kale, chard, I’ve steamed spinach. I am curious what would happen if I used it to cook rice or even risotto but haven’t tried. Oatmeal the fancier the better, cornmeal porridge, polenta. Hot chocolate. Tea: I’m a little snobby about tea, but anything I’d be willing to put milk and sugar in otherwise is delicious with maple sap. You can use it instead of water in pickling solution and brines. You can use it to reconstitute dried mushrooms.
And, yes, you can make maple syrup. It’s still worth doing, as a special treat. I personally recommend what I’ve been calling maple sap caramel, where you put a quart of maple sap on the stove on medium at lunchtime and let it simmer away all day, til after dinner it has passed the syrup stage and congealed into 2 tablespoons of gloriously delicious goo, which you then eat over ice cream.
I am certain there are a million more applications yet to be rediscovered. Any ideas?
All this—as with everything, of course—is temporary. The long-term climate and habitat forecast calls for maple to move north, along with other hardwoods, following the freeze/thaw cycle. (Did you know Canada has strategic maple syrup reserves, which it already had to break into in 2021 to make up for plummeting production?) But I have reason to hope that process will take long enough I can keep on experimenting for another decade, at least—mitigating my water usage, buying less sugar, and thereby reintegrating myself with natural cycles and interdependence with other living things. And I expect this to yield all kinds of dividends in other directions, which—from this industrialized, hyper-specialized perspective I am trying to shrug—might seem unrelated, but will turn out to have been the same thing all along.