Sunday, June 14, 2009
Food, Travel, In this Issue...

Marvelous maple

SP heads to Canada to learn about the sweet stuff

By Hope S. Philbrick
   
Maple syrup is a happy accident. The legend is that an Algonquin Indian named Woksis threw a tomahawk at a squirrel climbing up a maple tree. When his wife retrieved the meat, she discovered a birch bucket left at the base of the tree was filled with water, and opted to use that water to prepare the meal, which turned out to be the sweetest, best-tasting squirrel stew ever. The couple’s experiments to repeat those results led to their discovering how to make maple syrup. All this and more, I learned during a recent visit to La Maison Amérindienne (the American Indian Museum) in Québec, Canada.
   
Maple syrup is not, as you may have heard, produced from the sap of maple trees. The folks who told you differently weren’t liars; they were English speakers. Turns out that in French, there are two different words to distinguish between the liquid that’s used to make maple syrup and the actual tree sap. But there’s no English translation for the first French word, so both liquids have been called sap. If actual sap were used, however, the stuff you’d pour on pancakes would be bitter, and collecting it would kill trees. What is used can best be described as maple water: It’s the water that a tree drinks up through its roots each spring. Maple water is clear, and when sipped straight from the tree it looks, tastes and even smells like plain ol’ water, with maybe just a whiff of wood. Who’d have guessed that melted snow filtered through a tree could be transformed into something so delicious?

This year, maple water started running in Québec’s Montérégie region on March 18. Ideal conditions are “freezing nights and thawing days,” says Pierre Faucher, proprietor of Sucrerie de la Montagne, a traditional sugar shack located in a 120-acre maple forest in Rigaud. On average, a maple tree will yield nearly 16 gallons of maple water during the three-to-five week period before night freezes stop, sap starts running and taps must be removed. (Tapping a tree doesn’t kill it: Maple forests last hundreds of years.) Boiling 40 gallons of maple water for three to four hours will yield one gallon of maple syrup. (Shorter or longer boiling creates products such as maple sugar and maple taffy, respectively.) Syrups get darker and richer in flavor as the season progresses. Amber, the darkest grade, is best for cooking—substitute 1 ¼ cups maple syrup for 1 cup granulated sugar in any recipe. Medium, the grade most commonly found in grocery stores, represents 70 percent of annual production.
   
Since 80 percent of the world’s maple syrup is produced in Québec, visiting provides an opportunity not only to learn how it’s made, but also to taste maple used as an ingredient in various dishes. Heading to sugar shacks is a springtime ritual for Quebecers. “There’s something for everybody,” says Linda Gallant of Auberge des Gallant of the range of Québec’s sugar shacks. 

Options include Faucher’s traditional operation, where maple water is collected in metal buckets, and the Gallant’s modern operation, where pipes run between trees—the $1 million production building might not be a “shack,” per se, but does produce 30,000 pounds of maple syrup each year. Meals at Sucrerie de la Montagne are an all-you-can-eat feast served family-style, boasting dishes like pea soup, bacon, ham, baked beans, meatballs, sausage, baked potatoes, sugar pie and more. Diners at Auberge des Gallant can opt for gourmet meals that utilize maple syrup as an ingredient in every dish served, from beer to cappuccino to butternut squash soup to pork filet to maple crème brûlée.
   
Québec cuisine is typically more sweet than salty—but that doesn’t mean everything is sickly sweet; it just has a layer of the complex, caramel earthiness that is maple. The fact that maple syrup has a place on the table beyond breakfast is underscored at restaurants like Cocagne Bistro Orgueilleux in Montréal and Restaurant Le Jozéphil in Beloeil, where each sip and bite of a maple-infused dish left me wanting more. Luckily, though maple syrup may be made in spring, it’s a flavor that can be enjoyed year-round. SP