Making the Maple Sugar

So this is what Maple Syrup looks like when it has been boiled down to 256 degrees F.  For candy makers, this is not quite the Hard Crack stage.  And if you are making maple candy, you would pour this into molds right now.  If you want sugar, you'll need some experience on looking for the signs, some friends to stir and some special equipment.  In this case, an antique brass candy pot, hung on a tripod over a small fire.  It is during this part of the operation that you risk scorching the sugar, which makes all the tapping, the wood splitting, the gathering, the boiling and the hard work mean nothing.  If the ratio of syrup to sap is 1:40 - uh well, I better try to calculate that in pounds of dry weight instead of this ratio.  Stand by...

Watch your temperature and your fire closely.  Not too much and not too little of either.

Once the boiling doesn't seem to throw much steam anymore, the bubbles are no longer foamy but rather big and dry and the paddle you've been stirring with drips a liquid that looks really cloudy and almost granular, you will pour it into a heat resistant trough - this next piece of special equipment is carved from Basswood - and then you get your friends to start stirring with special wooden paddles that are carved to about 24 inches long to keep all hands well above the hot liquid.

You can't see in this picture, but the friends are all standing at the ready...

The stirring not only releases the heat from this super-heated sweetness, but releases the moisture that remains between us and pourable, dry, easily-stored sugar.   

It's crazy how the consistency moves from liquid, to a peanut butter,

to rather a bread dough... and from time to time, we're told to push it all to the center to gather its heat, and after a few moments, we're told to begin stirring again, which releases a cloud of steam.

We start getting confident that all our stirring is actually getting us somewhere when we see what was once a mass sticking together beginning to release itself from the lump into a granular form, drying out in the cold air.  We are trying our best not to flip sugar out of the trough, but you are using your paddle down the side of the trough to smear the sugar in order to break up any chunks forming.  It's hard not to brim the trough from time to time, but you'll suffer the chiding from the rest of the stirrers.

It is at this point that someone is told to take a fistful of sugar and squeeze it together to see if it binds or falls apart.  If it binds, we are not finished stirring.  If it does not or does loosely, we bring out a double paper grocery bag and scoop it from the trough so that it can both still breathe through the paper of the bag, but continue to cool down the rest of the way without leaving condensation where we've chosen to store it.

Zinziibaakwad - Maple Sugar in Ojibwe