Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're talking today about maple syrup. And I'm not going to lie to you, dear listeners. I want something maple like right now.
I need too. This was I don't know if this came from a listener or it came from many listeners or just my own brain, but we not even thinking. I just throw this one to Livia. Uh kind of forgetting that I don't want to give I don't want to doc's Olivia, but let's just say she lives in the New England area.
Uh huh sure.
So she was like, oh yeah, baby, right up my alley, let's do it.
Yeah. I have the impression that she'll eat a thing of maple cotton knee to hand it to her.
Yeah. I could feel the joy coming through Libya's keyboard in this one, which is always nice for sure.
And the timing's amazing too, because the showing season is basically just wrapped up as far as I can tell. And I think it was a good one.
Yeah.
Yeah, Olivia also just as a little thing. Remember we've said that she always has great titles, and this one was how to Drink a Tree's Blood.
Yeah, I think that's gonna be the title.
Oh good, Okay, good.
I mean I might put in parentheses maple syrup, you Sicico or something like that.
Sure. I like that. Anytime Siico ends up in a title, I think something great has.
Happened, including the movie Sicico.
So is there a movie called Sicico? Yeah?
Wasn't that didn't wasn't that one a Harmony Korean's movie or Krine? I don't know, I think so. No, No, that was Michael Moore, Sorry, Michael. Oh yeah, yeah, the documentary one, Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, about the American healthcare system and how broken it is. Yeah, so chuck, all right, so let's talk about maple syrup. We both want some maple syrup. This is fair warning to anyone listening. You're gonna want some maple, and that's okay. It's okay to want something maple, even if you don't have.
It, that's right. But if we're gonna start with maple syrup, we got to start with the maple tree. There are all kinds of maple trees. But if you and and you can get sugary sap from other kinds of maple trees, but if you want the real gold, and if you want the real gold standard industry wide, you're gonna tap into that sweet, sweet sugar maple, the Acer sacarum, because that's the one that has the real good stuff, that
has the highest concentration of sugar in its sap. And uh, like you said, you might tap a red maple if that's all you got around, but you need a lot more of it to end up with what you want. So you really want, you really want that sugar maple.
Right, And if you say, okay, guys, I'm all fine to sugar maple, where do I go? They're all over the place. Actually, they have a pretty great range. We're talking about North America, Northern North America, which includes the northeastern US, southeastern Canada. We're talking New Brunswick, We're talking Nova Scotia. Yeah, don't leave out Quebec, because Southern Quebec is the far and away the largest producer of maple
syrup in the world. Parts of Ontario and then Maine, all the way down in North Carolina you can find sugar maples. There are some places that sugar maples grow that they're not going to they're not going to make maple syrup as much there because there's also an addition to the actual tree itself. There are environmental conditions, climate conditions that have to take place, and they're so variable that maple syrup production and maple sugar production has resisted
industrialization throughout its lifetime. And that just makes me cheer.
Yeah, because it's like you have to tap a tree that grows in the woods to do that, and I bet they've tried, but they haven't figured out a way to build a factory around a forest with trees going.
Through it, right, Yeah, as far as I know, no one's tried that. Well, I guess the biodome kind.
Of punts, Yeah, probably so. But what we're about to describe, everybody is one of the wonders of nature. I didn't know anything about this stuff, so it was all new to me, and I was kind of blown away. It was kind of a mind bomb, if you will, for me. The magic to the maple syrup, obviously is that sap, and that sap has a very specific function in a tree. The sapwood is a part of the tree. It's also
called the xylum. It's in that tree trunk just outside of the heartwood, and it has tissue in that sapwood in the xylum that moves water and minerals around from the roots to the leaves. It's kind of like the freeway system, if you will.
Yeah, or it's circulatory system hormones too. That's what sap is. It's minerals, water, hormones, all the stuff that the tree is moving to itself to help repare wounds and to produce photosynthesis, and then also move the products from photosynthesis, which is like starches back down to the roots. Right, So you've got stuff moving up and down the tree trunk. But if you you walk up to sugar maple in the summer and you put a tap into it, it's going to just be like this, that was useless and
it kind of hurt. There's a specific time when you want to tap a sugar maple to get the constituent maple SAP.
That's right, and that is in the major producing parts, which is what we described before. That will be generally between like February and April, with a peak in March. And that is because and this is the second sort of astounding part of this stuff, that xylum that sap would it's moving stuff all around, but it's also really good at holding energy reserves during times where it needs it.
So they are the cells called ray parinama that use enzymes that turn those starches Josh was talking about into sugars and it's a great way to store that energy. But that sugar also protects the tissue from freezing during the winter, So it's just sort of sitting there like in the perfect conditions to be tapped in those months.
Yeah, because there's this kind of positive pressure that builds up in the tree because on nights where it's freezing and that turn into days that get above freezing. Right, So when the icicles start to really drip, I've seen the sap itself starts moving up and down. And when it moves up, normally, when there's leaves on the tree, transpiration or basically evaporation at the leaf surface that relieves
that pressure. But remember this is a time when the sugar maples don't have leaves yet, so it can't kind of relieve that pressure, and the pressure builds up and builds up, and so if you go to a sugar maple at specifically the right time, when it's freezing at night, not freezing in the day, and you put a tap into it, that's when the SAP's going to come out. And like you said, those starches have been converted to sugars as energy stores, so that's also when the sap
is going to be at its sweetest. There is a couple of weeks that you can tap a specific kind of tree in a specific location under specific climate conditions. To get the sap. You're gonna need to make maple syrup. And I mean, I just love maple syrup so much more than I did before.
Yeah, for sure, it's you know, once once those conditions leave that step, it didn't dry up, but it stops running freely. If you could get to it, it wouldn't taste the same, like you said, it would be kind of bitter, but you can't get to it anyway. And this is like a seasonal cycle, Like this is when the trees are beginning to bud again, you know, like we said,
at peaks and march basically. And if you let's say you tapped a tree and you got a little bit of that good stuff and you put it on your tongue, it wouldn't taste like the final result. It's sweet. You can taste the sweetness, but it's about you know, the SAP ranges from about one to three percent of that sweetness at that point, so like it needs to be processed after that point because what you really want to get it too is a sugar concentration about sixty six percent, Yeah,
which means you have to boil it. You have to boil down about forty gallons to get one gallon of syrup.
Yeah, there's actually there was this maple syrup researcher from the turn of the last century named C. W. Jones, and he came up with what's called the Jones rule of eighty six. And I'm not sure how it works.
It seems a little magical, but you can take the percentage of sugar that's found in the sap naturally that you just got out of the tree, and multiply that percentage by eighty six and it will tell you how many gallons you need to boil down to get one gallon of maple syrup at sixty six percent sugar concentration.
That's right, And usually it's about that forty gallon range. Yeah, people have you know, we're not the first persons to enjoy this. Stuff like has a very long history among indigenous North American groups and they used it for all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of different stories like like you know, who's the first person to eat oyster? Like how do they figure out this tree sap was something you wanted, like the first person to tap it? And it probably no one knows for sure. It probably
happened by accident. There's a lot of stories. One of them is that there was a tomahawk in a tree. That tomahawk got pulled out and there just happened to be a container below it that caught that sap and some indigenous person was like, oh well, let me take that water that's in this bucket from the rain and boil some meat for dinner. And they're like wait a minute, this is like, you know, has a sweet taste to it. So it was a complete accident. It's kind of a
nice story. My money's probably on just another kind of accident. Maybe someone just sort of tasted it with their finger because a woodpecker pecked a hole in a tree and they're like, hey, may maybe we can use this something because they had long use SAPs and gums for other things, so it wasn't like any big like revelation that something from a tree was useful.
Sure, yeah, totally. That's a good point. Another suggests is that somebody noticed a sapsicle and try that, because the sugar content of the sap itself has a lower freezing point than the water, so the water separates out as it freezes, and then the sap, the sugary sap eventually freezes more with a higher concentration of sugar. And if somebody broke that off and licked it, they'd be like, wait to get to the bottom of what's going on here, because this is de lish.
I would love a real sapsicle. That'd be fun.
We should also say this, so the the Europeans who came over to colonize North America got this, like learned about maple syrup directly from the indigenous people who were here, like the Abenaki, the how to know Sni, the Ojibwa, the Algonquin. All of them had methods and techniques for getting maple sap out of sugar maple trees, and they
had like their own techniques. Each group had a slightly different technique, but ultimately what it usually boiled down to was cutting a laceration in the bark of the tree, possibly putting like a hollow twig in there to serve as the tap. Sometimes they just let it trickle down the bark of the tree, and then they would usually catch it in like a little birch bark container. The ones that I saw look like little tiny rowboats, which I bet you could use as rowboats after the sugaring season.
That's right after they got that sap you know, like I said, it was still you still have to process it and boil it down. There were different techniques that they used, you know, depending what tribe you were from, but one of them most certainly was probably putting heated rocks into a container and kind of boiling and evaporating out the water that way a lot slower process actually. Yeah. In fact, sometimes they would just put it over hot
fire and let it happen. Sometimes they would just leave it out in the sun and take like the real slow roll approach to get the water out of there.
Yeah. Also they from that I guess, the sapsicle kind of thing, they figured out that you could also freeze it out like you could freeze the water out, remove the ice, and you've just basically evaporated a bunch of water from the sap. So there was probably different techniques that could also be combined to just to get it more and more closer to what you wanted. And we should say that the indigenous peoples of North America who were doing this pre contact, they were not making syrup
nearly as much from what we understand. They were making this into sugar, sugar cakes, granulated sugar. They were making sugar out of the maple sap, which is essentially the same thing. You're boiling it down further than you would syrup, but you let it dry. Once it gets to a thickened state, you let it dry it. Then you break it up and you've got maple sugar on your hands.
Specifically, for one drive, it was sort of a seasonal shift for the Ogway people. Like in the wintertime they would break up into smaller groups of like a dozen or so and travel around and hunt and ice fish and stuff like that, and in the spring they would
come back together and form like these bigger communities. And that sugaring process and tapping those trees was kind of the first big thing that they did so they could you know, store it as long as possible, hopefully all year long, and then you know, did their other spring and summer stuff like you know, plant and harvest and stuff like that. But sugaring season kind of kicked off of the coming back together, which is kind of cool.
That's another thing I love about it is that's what it's called. When you go and you collect the sap to make maple syrup or maple sugar from, it's called the sugaring season. The place where you boil down the SAPs called the sugar shack.
The sugar bush.
Yeah, the stand of trees of sugar maples together is called the sugar bush. Kind of like a wooded area. Another name for that. Not the evergreen scrub bush that's found out in chaparral country. This is just a group of sugar maples together in an area. That's your sugar bush. I just love this whole thing.
Yeah. When they would pass pass it back and forth, they would say, give me some sugar, baby. That's really I love it that. The word sugar is a very pleasing sound to my ear.
So sure, especially and also when you think of the snow. I think of the snow and like the maples in the snow like visually, and then thinking of the word sugar with all that stuff too. Just gosh, that almost makes me want to go do like basically move and buy like a little parcel of land that has some sugar maples on it and just make like a gallon once a year or something like that. Seems like a lot to do just for a gallon of maple syrup that I could probably buy from somebody else for much much,
much cheaper and less effort. But it just seems nice, you know, like a pleasant way to be.
Oh, people do that, I mean, I know in this article Livia said that like doing it in your house isn't super recommended because all the steam creates from boiling it down. But I've seen videos like there are definitely people that tap trees on their land and just get small amounts of sugar and like, you know, kind of like somebody might get honey from bees and set a little stand on the side of the road.
Yeah, for sure. I was looking at like a map or sugaring I guess supply house and they had like three four hundred dollars evaporation pans that you basically put on like a propane gas like heater or burner, And yeah, you could, you could do it wherever. But yes, I think I would build a little sugaring shack or sugar shack just a yeah, just a wood burn into a sign to hang over the door that said sugar shack.
Yeah, And if some paote happened to find its way in there, so be it. So we should mention before we take our break. You know, they were obviously eating this stuff in a lot of ways, the indigenous peoples. They were making corn meal based breads with it. They would put it on all kinds of like meats and fish,
and I imagine it tasted just so great. So it was the flavor for them, but it was also a very calorie rich thing in the early spring when their winter food was sort of dwindling, right, and so you know, and as we'll see later, their health properties too, So they probably had a hunch about that as well.
And don't forget the tiny rowboats that you could put in like a laker a pond. After sure, that's right, Yeah, let's take that break, all.
Right, We'll be right back and talk more about maple right after.
This, So Chuck I said that European colonizers got there just total awareness of maple sugaring or syruping from the local indigenous people. One of the things that the local indigenous peoples got from the Europeans were metal pots, which vastly improved the process of making maple syrup and make maple sugar for the indigenous tribes. Like that, no longer did youift to put a heated rock in some sort of bowl with some sap and just weight Like this just increased things tremendously.
Yeah. I wonder if they collected in that or if they stuck to their baby boats.
I hope, I hope baby boats. That's my that's my wish.
I think so too. So early on in that colonization process, you know, the settlers, obviously we're doing the same thing, collecting it and using their methods. It was cheaper than importing cane sugar from the Caribbean, Yeah, which is where that was all coming from. And it became like the de facto sweetener of the United States at some point, and then later became a sort of a cause, an
abolitionist cause. I think in the eighteenth century, abolitionists and Quakers were using like maple like as a way to say, hey, let's not especially founding father Benjamin Rush, like, hey, let's not support these British slave based plantations in the Caribbean that we're getting this cane sugar, Like, we can get our own sweet stuff right here and export it and not promote slavery, and it tastes great.
Yeah, but in that export, if you made enough to export, you could also undercut the sugar market in Great Britain back home, so you were really kind of hobbling the
slave slave based plantation societies by doing that. Thomas Jefferson was like, I'm on board, let's do this, because it fit into his vision of the United States being a collective of Yaouman farmers who are basically, you know, growing enough for themselves in a little as sell Like, yeah, just plant some sugar maples too, and it'll be great. Because one of the things that makes sugaring attractive is that it takes place in this weird in between time when there's normally not a lot to do on a
family farm. Now you have a whole other revenue stream and you're getting a bunch of maple syrup out of it too, just by sugaring adding that to like your yearly thing.
So we did mention earlier that you know, they probably tried to turn this into a large scale thing, but it just failed kind of time after time because it's such a labor intensive thing. And you know, but as a result, you know, maple you know, I think I said at one point it was like the most common sweetener in the US. That kind of started falling away because it's so labor intensive. And by the second half of the nineteenth century, cane sugar prices fell a lot,
and then beat sugar started being produced. So maple sugar, it just, you know, as far as being a sweetener, kind of fell by the wayside for a long time. Yeah, but they started, you know, people still like that flavor, especially on things like pancakes and waffles, so they needed to unfortunately kind of cut it with other stuff. So they maple producers started cutting it with that cane sugar I mentioned in corn syrup, and that's where we get
you know, missus Butterworth. That's where we get that pancake syrup that we have today.
I have Missus Butterworth written right there.
I mean what else is there aunt Jemima? Those are the only two. And I don't think it's called Auntjemima anymore, is it? Or is it?
No? No, it's I can't remember what they call, like Old Mill or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, they changed the name. Here's my secret. Like, if I go to the restaurant and they have the maple syrup at the nice brunch, I love it. I'm not going to turn my nose up and I know that's the gold, but man, I love that that buttery pancake syrup.
Oh yeah, me too. So I was thinking about what I was raised on. I didn't have real maple syrup until I was I don't know, probably in my forties, to tell you the truth, I finally was like the same, I want to see what this is like and ordered some and it. I mean, it's pretty good, but it is a different animal from what I grew up on, which wasn't even missus Butterworth's. My mom was like, no,
that's too expensive. She would make a one to one simple syrup and then put a little bit of artificial maple flavoring in it, and that was that is maple syrup to me, and I love it still like, that's still my favorite kind of syrup.
Now, when you say you ordered it, what does that mean ordered it off the shelf at the grocery store.
No, I ordered some online first, I think, before I noticed that you could get it at grocery store. Wow, okay, yeah, because I'm like, organic, real maple syrup. Where are you gonna find that? And yeah, apparently just about everywhere.
Yeah, I mean we have that stuff around. And here's what I didn't know either, is that U and I know Canadians and Northeastern people in the of the United States are probably like, you guys are such rude.
Oh they're a gas right now.
But hey, I grew up in Georgia, like this is just wasn't a thing. It's not a thing down here like it is up there. So I didn't know you had to refrigerate it. So I went through the stage of like, you know, why do I have mold spores on my maple syrup and Missus Butterworth is just fine sitting right next to it on the shelf.
Yeah. I'm a little nervous about the syrup I got because it's been in my pantry for a long time and it still doesn't have mold, so it's got like anti freeze or something cut into it.
Is this stuff you ordered in your forties? Yeah, you haven't gone through one bottle.
No, I haven't, because it is it's so different from what I like, or what I'm used to is maple syrup, that it's like a special kind of thing. It's not what I go for now anytime I'm like syrup, like, it's a very occasional thing for me.
Yeah, I'm with you, man. I definitely came on to it late, and it was definitely like in a restaurant somewhere where they, you know, had a little cup on the table next to me. I was like, Oh, this is really.
Good in a cup, like a little Sellow cup.
No, no, no, no, like the little little logoramic. You know, I gotcha, I gotcha beside the waffle.
So what's interesting You kind of said that that maple syrup production is kind of slowly but surely kind of bounced back and forth, but never really kind of gotten huge. I think we've made that point very clearly by now.
But in the late twentieth century, especially, like I think around the seventies, it did kind of get a boost because people are like, you know what, we can use those vacuum pumps that we used to pump milk on our family farm and plastic tubing that we'll just connect to the taps and we can make this a lot
easier on ourselves. Because if you are a traditional sugaring operation, you have pails hanging from your taps, that's in a tree, and every day you have to go collect the pails and immediately start boiling it so that it doesn't grow bacteria. This is like you just kick back and let it all come to you, and it's probably going into a pretty decent size advance machine that's handling all of the processing for you as well.
Yeah, for sure, the advent of the reverse osmosis machine became a really big deal because that was just a way more efficient way to remove water from the sap before you boil it down. So I think they can get about ninety percent of the water out with the reverse osmosis machine, So that really drastically reduces the boiling time to get down to that really sugary good stuff. Right. And the other thing is, you know, back in the day, they had to use you know, wood fired boilers and stuff,
like that. Now they use propane. So lots of little things kind of came along to make it more industrial, but still not you know, it's still trees in a forest that you're tapping. It's not like some big like I said, like a factory built around it or something.
I was reading a lot of stuff explaining how this whole thing works, and one of the sites that has some good explainers is greens Sugar House. And they still use wood.
Oh really, they.
Said, they're one of the few who uses wood still.
I wonder if there's a benefit to that or just they like to be old school and tout that.
I think maybe old school. I don't know. Yeah, So all of this put together, reverse osmosis, vacuum pumps, plastic tubing, when you combine it. By the mid nineties, I think maple syrup production in the US and Canada together increased four hundred percent over just like a couple decades earlier. So still not industrialized, but enough now that like you can start to supply the world with maple syrup. And that's that's definitely what's happening.
Yeah, for sure. You know, climate changes put a dent in almost everything, and maple the maple industry is no stranger to that, especially in the US. But snow cover is a pretty big deal. So it's not snowing as much, and snow cover helps insulate those roots, so that's no
great not a great thing. The trees are also more affected by disease and invasive species that come with warmer temperature, and all of this has resulted in I don't know about a consensus, but a lot of scientists are saying that, like this may be a Canada only thing in the not too distant future, Like that range is reducing, and it's reducing northward.
Right, remember our plant migration episode? Like that, Yeah, for sure, so you said that there the range of sugar maples is moving northward aka plant migration. There are other things that have happened over the years with the sugar bushes. Remember stands of sugar maples that we figured out, like that's not good, we should try something different. And these family farmers basically just did something logical, and we're like, well, let's just tear down some of these other trees and
plant more sugar maples. And so the sugar bush turned into a very almost a monoculture basically where it was nothing but sugar maples, and that makes sense economically on the short term, but in the long term it's not good because it reduces biodiversity.
Yeah for sure. And we should mention there is another plant called a sugar bush, but we're not talking about that, just so save your emails.
I did. I was talking it's a chaparral plant. It's a scrub bush.
Yeah, who wants that?
I guess people who like the chaparral. People who live in like twenty nine palms.
Yeah, okay. So you know, biodiversity is an important part of any thriving ecosystem, and sugar maples are no different. Once you simplify that tree species, you know it's gonna drive out certain kinds of birds, and those kinds of birds might be feeding on the invasive little insect critters,
so they need to protect that biodiversity. So places are now sort of realizing we need to not just cut down swas of other things to plant sugar maples, and Vermont is one of them, and they enacted an effort that now requires twenty five percent of trees and a sugar bush to be other species other than that sugar maple.
Right. Yeah, So That was nice to come full circle like that and realize like, yeah, you don't want to do that. There's reasons to keep things biodiverse. I love it when nature's like, no, that's not going to work. Let's go back to how I had it before.
Yeah, for sure, if you're wondering about the trees themselves, they have to be about forty years old, so even when they were planning these things, it takes decades and decades to be able to tap them, and they have to be a certain size. They can only be about ten inches in diameter and are generally only tapped once unless they're big mamas. If they're over eighteen inches, you might be able to tap that thing a second time.
Yeah, which kind of raised the question for me. Not beg the question, it just raised it like can you hurt like does it hurt the tree when you're removing sap because it seems kind of sensible, like it's not like it naturally exudes the sap, So if you're coming along as a person and removing it, like is the tree like hey I need that, and it seems to be not the case.
Yeah, that's good. I think I had that same question years ago. About coal seams if I'm not Oh yeah, yeah, I think I asked that on the show. I was like, I always wondered if like just removing all of this stuff from the Earth's core is like not a great thing.
I could see that you leave in holes and destabilizing it, It's going to turn into Swiss cheese eventually.
You know what, you might have said that fifteen years ago.
I probably did Swiss cheese. But with as far as the sap goes, removing it and harming the sugar maple. That doctor Jones from University of Vermont who came up with the Jones rule of eighty six, he did a study and estimated that something like four to nine percent of an eight to ten inch diameter trees total carbohydrate reserves are removed during a sugaring season, and that people don't tap trees that small, like you said, ten inches in diameter minimum. So the bigger trees probably have even
more reserves and lose less of a person. And so no, over a sugaring season, you're probably not going to tap enough sap to actually harm the tree in any way.
That's great, but you did make one mistake. I believe it's pronounced doctor Jones.
Right, Yeah, it definitely stood out to me too. But I uh, what's weird is I thought of Sean Connery and not Harrison Ford. Oh something's wrong with me. Oh man, that's a sign of something or other. I'm sure there's like a psychiatric test that gives you that, Like a picture of Sean Conry picture of Harrison Ford says which one's doctor Jones, and you better pick Harrison Ford or else they're going to institutionalize you.
Yeah, Or I mean if you would have said Shila both, I would just just walk into traffic after that.
They don't even want to diagnose that one.
No. Uh So we should talk a little bit about how this stuff is processed. You know, if, like we mentioned sort of the home processors, or if you're just a small scale producer, you're probably probably have that sugar house on your property. If you have a larger operation, you're probably collecting from nearby but taking it to a central boil boiler location like a larger sugar house obviously, and then inside that sugar house. You know, evaporation is a big part of it. You know, we talked about
indigenous people evaporating out all that water. You still need to do the same thing on a small scale. I know you mentioned like the the propane heater, like the turkey fryer kind of thing that you repurposed, or a wood fryer. But when you get larger, you know, it's gonna be larger machines and they're you know, they're gonna be a little they're gonna have more bells and whistles on them.
Yeah, you repurposed the turkey frier because you didn't read online that you're not supposed to drop a frozen turkey in a deep fryar because you almost caught your house on fire. So your partner said, no, you need to get that out into a sugar shack and make some syrup with it instead.
Yeah, and by god, please do not fry your turkey indoors either at all.
Oh, good Lord, who does that?
A video of a guy doing it, it's not good.
Was he running it off a generator that he had indoors as well? No?
No, I mean it was a standard propane situation, but he did it like in his kitchen.
Yeah.
I mean, you can find a video of anybody doing anything dumb these days.
One other thing we're not going to talk about him, but I urge you if you're like I kind of like this, this sounds neat. Look up evaporator pants. They're really cool, very cool. So something that I had no idea that's actually kind of the fact of the podcast possibly the flavor of maple syrup. The maple flavor itself. It's not really present very much in the SAP from what I understand, it's actually a result of the Mayard reaction.
The same thing that turns bread into toast. Yeah, makes some duck delicious all it does all sorts of amazing things, and it's part of the I think the caramelization process. It gives that that SAP. It's maple flavor.
Yeah, we have a pretty good detailed description of that in our Toast episode, which I think was quite good. So go check that one out.
It was.
And by the way, we want to mention there's a new thing on Apple podcast where, oh yeah, if you mentioned something from like a past episode that I think something will now pop up on your podcast player that like tells you where that episode is, which is kind of cool.
Yeah, I think it has a link that you can click. Yeah, like Apple has done some just amazing stuff for their podcast app and player now and it's like, yeah, I mean, hats off to them for the design and thought that they put into it. So yeah, I say go check it out because we I think we have a whole channel there now.
So back to the process. Though, after you have that boiling going on and get rid of that water, you're evaporating the water, you still are going to have to filter that stuff out because something's in there called sugar sand. It's like, you know, concentrated minerals and stuff, and it might you know, make it look cloudy. And this is stuff that you want to either sell on the side of the road or sell in the store, and so you're going to filter it from there. And to me,
this next thing was the fact of the podcast. If you're if you're a fan of wine, you know that tear war is a thing where a grape growing from a certain vine out of certain soil in a certain place on Earth, under certain climate conditions will taste different than that same grape grown elsewhere. And that's the same thing with maple trees. It has a tear war and if you are a highly sort of specialized maple syrup producer, or a sugarer. I guess sugar daddy.
Yeah, sugar edady.
You can be like well known for your particular tear war and you can charge like a lot more money. I don't know by a lot more money, but you can have like an elevated price because you have such a specialized tear war to your tree and syrup.
Right, you're like my sugar maples are fertilized only with pig feces coming from pigs that are fed on a diet of organic truffles.
Yeah. Maybe, so you.
Could get a lot of money for that syrup, is what I understand.
I think so.
So. Canada is far and away the largest exporter of maple syrup. They essentially supply the world with syrup. Yeah, I think they produce about Back in twenty twenty three, O Livia found four hundred and fifty seven million dollars worth of maple syrup Canada produced and sold. The US follows at thirty five million. That eus about thirteen million. But Canada makes so much maple syrup that the US, which produces a ton of maple syrup, still imports more than it exports or sells from Canada.
That's right, and that's just another reason that we need to stay good friends with Canada.
Yeah, because they got the syrup.
That's right, And we're going to be expressing that sentiment on our summer tour all across Canada. The good will will be flowing hopefully tapped, just like the maple syrup.
Yeah, it's the Dove and the Olive branch.
Tour Quebec alone. We need to shout them out. I know you mentioned they were the biggest producer. They produce about seventy percent I'm sorry, seventy two percent of the world supply of maple syrup, fifty five million taps going in Quebec alone, and they have what some people call
a cartel. In Canada. There's a government sort of endorse industry group called the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers or shortened with their French name, the PPAQ that basically acts as the go between between the eight thousand producers and the customers. And like they're really in the business. It's not just like, yeah, we want to make sure everything's going okaya. They like they tell you how to market it, how to sell it, what to do with the reserves. Like they're really, really involved.
Yeah, they're like the Opec of maple syrup. Essentially, they have a strategic reserve that they started in two thousand that can hold up the ten million gallons. I saw them also described as a mafia by an independent syrup producer, because if you produce maple syrup in Quebec, it does not matter if you're a member of the PPAQ. You still have to give them a cut of your proceeds from the sale of maple syrup. So like they set the prices, they can make the price artificially high low
depending on what they want to do. And this is not to say like this is just all bad. They have done a lot of good for maple syrup producers across Quebec. But they're apparently also extremely aggressive in enforcing their rules.
Yeah, I think that's the deal. Here in the United States, if you want to talk about the top producers, look no further than Vermont. Vermont very well known for their maple syrup, and New York State is after that, and then you know other New England states. But you also got to throw in, oddly, maybe not oddly, Virginia, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Minnesota as other decent sized producers. But it's really the name of the game, and the US is Vermont.
Vermont, the old VAT and I say we take a break, but first we cannot not mention the ppaq's strategic reserves and not mentioned the great maple Syrup Heist of twenty eleven to twenty twelve. Yeah, take it away, Oh okay, Well, apparently, starting in twenty eleven, a group of thieves slowly tapped off twenty seven hundred tons of maple syrup from barrels
inside one of the PPAQ strategic warehouses. And nobody caught this for months because they either filled the barrels with water or they left them empty, but either way, the barrels were in place, so anybody walking through the warehouse would not think anything was amiss. And it wasn't until
an audit that it was found. And I think out of twenty seven also, this whole I think the whole thing was like thirteen million dollars worth of maple syrup that was stolen, and they only got back four hundred and fifty of the twenty seven hundred tons, and even that they were like, we got to destroy this because it's basically been through the Ringer, you know, stolen and recovered and all that, and several people went to prison. One of them I think his name is Richard Valliers.
He was sentenced to seven years and ten months filed US for this heist. That's how serious Quebec takes its maple syrup.
All right, we'll take that second break and we'll finish up right after this. All right, we're back, and let's talk about other parts of the world, because we mentioned Europe produces some maple syrup, and you know it happens here and there. They you don't have like the big swings between day and night that you really need to cause the sap to run super well. So a lot of times they'll work with other trees. Birch trees can produce a sap. Other kinds of maple trees I mentioned
can produce sap. You're probably not going to make that into maple syrup. You're probably using it for making like you know, like an additive, like making beer, making vinegar, maybe as something in a drink. I know, there's a pretty rich tradition in South Korea of their native maple tree, the goroso tree, where they I mean this sounds dangerous to me. They get together in a hot room and drink like five gallons each of this stuff.
Yeah each, That sounds.
Like like I thought that amount of intake of liquid would kill you.
Well, essentially, it's supposed to do the opposite that. It's like a health tonic essentially, and then the sauna action you're sweating out toxins and you're replacing it with this healthful sap. But I mean, if they've been doing it for this long and people aren't over at the very least, it's not harmful.
I just wonder how many how long that is, like over five gallon time.
I don't know, five gallons of anything.
Say like five gallons of water will kill you on it.
Yeah, I think you can toxify.
Really, but yeah, they've been doing it for a long time. Northern China also drinks the sap of certain kinds of maple trees. But you know, outside of Europe, there are places in the United States, like the Pacific Northwest, where
they're tapping big leaf maples. The thing is, you just need a lot more about twice as much actually to get a gallon of syrup because it's just not as sugary, right, And here's the other thing too, that not only do they need a lot more to produce the syrup, but it doesn't have that same kind of climate consistency as far as like freezing every night and getting warm the next day. So it's sort of between November and March.
It seems like, and maybe if you're someone out there doing this, you can correct me, but it seems like it's tap as available sort of.
So you've got a bunch of syrup on your hands. You followed all of the processing tips that we gave you time, was that your maple syrup would be assigned a grade one of three grades fancy, A or B. Fancy was like the most delicate, Bee's the most robust. But people didn't understand that. They thought fancy was the best place, like cats up. Right, you think cats up is much better than catchup because it's fancy. That's not
the case. So they changed it. Now it's all grade A. But then they assign different categories based on the flavor and the color of it.
That's right. They have golden, amber, dark, and very dark, and that ranges respectively as delicate, rich, robust, and strong. Yeah, the very dark the strongest one you're probably going to be cooking with that the lightest, that golden delicate one, maybe putting it in a cocktail or something like the stuff that you've off the grocery store shelf or get ordered, I guess to be delivered to live on your home
shell forever for your pancakes and waffles. That's gonna be that amber maple syrup, right.
And then there's other stuff too, like say you didn't get the sugar sand out and it's cloudy, or it has a slightly off taste, like maybe you sugared a little too late in the season. That's graded. It's not an A grade, and they don't sell it in the stores. Instead, it's graded as maple syrup for processing. And so if you have like a maple taste in some industrially produced,
commercially available food, it's that kind of maple syrup. So if you've ever had waffle crisp cereal in the nineties, you were eating maple syrup for processing.
That's right. I did mention the refrigerator. If you don't open it, you can keep it on that shelf for about three years, but afterward you apparently do need to refrigerate it. And it can go for another three years. It's that high sugar content basically that's keeping it nice in pristine. But you know, as happened to me, once you open that stuff, it can get little mold spores.
Yeah, I gotta go check mine, because I really don't think it's molded. But let's say that you want something besides syrup. You're just so syruped out, you drank five gallons of it, and you want something other than the syrup. What are you going to turn to? Chuck?
Well, I know everyone's seen those little maple leaf shaped candies a door at a rest stop in New England and I'm sure all over Canada. But yeah, they're usually shaped like little maple leaves. They heat that stuff up and pour it into molds to cool down. It can be like a softer, light colored thing, depending on how hot you get it, or that dark, hard candy. And I've had those. Those are delicious.
Yeah. There's also maple cream, which is essentially whipped maple syrup.
Oh baby.
Yeah. And there's something called sugar on snow, which where you take a pack of snow packed together, which is why they call it a pack, and you pour boiling syrup onto it and it immediately congeals into like a caramel consistency, and you basically eat it like a candy. Sometimes they put it on like a popsicle or a sucker stick.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good. We got to mention to all our New England friends. I don't know if they have these in Canada, but the maple creamy is like a saucer of ice cream. And of course at any local county fair you're gonna get your maple cotton candy or a Quebec specialty, the delicious maple syrup pie.
I'm going to try that when we're in Montreal for sure, me too. I'm also going to try to find some maple sugar there too. Apparently when you bake with it, you can substitute I've seen one for one or three quarters for one with white granulated sugar in your recipe, and especially if you're making something fall like like a banana bread or apple pie or something like that, it apparently just steps up the flavor quite a bit.
Yeah. Oh, and I know last year I mentioned my maple old fashioned, which is now my kind of go to sweetener for my old fashions. It's really yummy.
Well you should try some maple sugar.
In there, man, instead of the syrup.
No, I mean you make the syrup with sugar, right.
Oh no, I just put syrup in there.
But what do you make the syrup from? Is what I'm saying.
From the bottle off the shelf at publics.
Oh, I thought you made your own. We gave people like a whole recipe, didn't we.
No? No, no, no, that was a That was a pumpkin spice.
Yeah, you should use maple sugar in that then.
Yeah, okay, good call. But I use maple syrup right out of the bottle for my other favorite old fashion very nice that public.
So you don't order it, no, just go to the store get it like a sucker. So you mentioned that it actually has some nutritional value, right, Yeah? I saw that it has ninety five percent of your daily value of manganese. Like beat that.
Yeah, what does manganese do for you? Everything?
Thirty seven percent of your daily value of viboflaving, which is a B vitium vitamin. Also has potassium, which is why I said vitium, calcium, zinc loads of antioxidants apparently, and it has a lower glycemic index score than sugar by far, so it spikes your blood sugar much less than sugar does.
Yeah, for sure. And they have evidence that some of the compounds from maple syrup can enhance the effectiveness of antibiotics.
Yeah, and that's in that's maple sera, Which means it's time for listener mail.
All right, this is a quick note from Kyle metzker Kyle says, Hey, guys, I was recently listening to the old episode from twenty eighteen on the Concord. Hey, we just mentioned another old episode, so that'll probably pop up on your little Apple player by the way. Nice and my ongoing quest to simultaneously listen to the back catalog as well as new episode. So Kyle, you are sandwiching my friend. That's right way to do it, I think.
Nice.
He said, Josh, you were continually amazed that the Concord fuel was kerosene. Is that was very primitive or old school, But actually almost all jet fuel was kerosene and has been since its inception. Basically, its two uses are jet fuel and household cooking and lighting fuel. I wanted to keep this in short and sweet guys, I love you too, and love the show.
Short and sweet, very appropriate for maple syrup episode. Sew, that's right, that was who metzker Kyle? Hey, Kyle, thanks a lot for that. We appreciate it. No idea that kerosene's been jet fuel forever, so thanks for that. And if you want to be like Kyle and send us an email that I say thanks for that about you can send it off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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