Sunday, April 21, 2013

The Finer Points of Finishing: Part 2


Once the clear sap has boiled the day away and whittled away into an inch of golden goodness in the bottom of the boiling pan, it’s time to drain it into one of our big canning pots.  Thankfully there’s a handy-dandy spigot in the corner to make the job easier.  After our most recent 12-14 hour boils, we’ve drained out about four gallons of near-syrup at this stage.  Then it’s off to the turkey fryer to boil off the last gallon of water.  The ring of the fryer burner is a perfect fit for our canning pots, and the propane burner is much easier to control.  Also perfect for roasting hot dogs, if a person needs a little protein to balance out the sugar.  Plus, it keeps us from making a mess of the kitchen stove.  On the burner, the syrup gently boils for quite a while with little attention, but when it gets close to finished, watch out!  That baby can boil over in a heartbeat.  Sadly, we know this from experience.

The syrup is officially finished when it reaches the magical 66% sugar content, or boils at seven degrees above the boiling temperature for water.  In most cases that would be the expected 219 degrees, unless the barometric pressure is all wonky.  For those of you who have been following the April weather in Minnesota this year, we think you’d agree there may have been some barometric wonkiness.  So rather than rely on a thermometer, we let our hydrometer tell us when it’s quittin’ time.  The hydrometer measures the density of the syrup, to give us a more precise measure of the sugar content.  We dip our handled hydrometer cup into the hot syrup and let the hydrometer float gently inside.  When the red line is visible above the syrup line in the cup, we call it a day.  And thank our lucky stars we avoided another sticky syrup spillover.