So last year many of you will remember that I got big into Maple Syrup. What you may not know is that I tried my hand at it the year prior also (Spring of 2017) and made roughly a gallon of syrup using only a stock pot and single burner.
It was hard, I had very little idea on what I was doing (Let’s just boil down this sugary water… Easy right?), I’m pretty sure I didn’t know what filtering was, nor bottling properly. Despite all of this, I was determined to enter it in my local fair, and enter I did!
Disqualified? On taste? Well now, I thought it tasted just fine but who am I to really say. Maybe it was a little off… Maybe I let that sap sit too long. Who knows?
As you can see, my syrup was also a little on the thick side. Barely. None-the-less was docked some points.
So this year I did the old maple sugarer’s trick. Grabbed my best maple syrup, jared it in a honey jar, and placed it in the freezer.
You read all that right. In the freezer. It keeps any impurities from forming. It never fully freezes due to the high sugar content. You remove it a few days ahead of time, clean up the glass and enter it.
I open up my freezer, pull out the jar, let it get to room temperature and I take a brix reading and taste it. The reading is a little low – I can boil it down some more… I taste it. Nah, it was early on and my reverse osmosis filters may not have been perfectly flushed for this batch.
Damn it!
So six month on deep freeze for nothing. I run down stairs to my cabinet filled with jars and pull out the best looking mid-season maple I could find. Put it in a honey jar and here it is:
I even took a brix reading
I’m as ready as I’m going to be and the judging will be done this Friday.
Here’s to hoping for more than a disqualification!
