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.