Highland Maple Festival

I went on an educational field trip this weekend, I thought I'd share. This is definitely not something I got to see living in Texas!

Some of us from the family drove about an hour away to the Highland Maple Festival. We started the morning at an all you can eat pancake breakfast. They had buckwheat pancakes (didn't care for), regular pancakes, homemade sausage (delicious!), and pure maple syrup (of course). I was impressed, this is obviously a major event every year for this small town but they got everyone through pretty quickly and all the volunteers were friendly and helpful. Gotta love small town USA!

After loading up on carbs we went to some farms to see how the syrup was made. Here are some pictures of how it was done "back in the day".

 

                                                                    

Buckets were placed on taps to collect the sap dripping from maple trees. They left this one uncovered to show visitors so yes, I tasted it. Didn't taste like much of anything to me.

The collected sap would be poured into long troughs like this. A fire burned underneath and the sap would be stirred occasionally, boiling off most of the water. It takes 40-60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of pure maple syrup!

Once most of the water was boiled off they'd transfer the liquid to smaller kettles where they could better control the heat of the fire. Here they would cook it more until the desired consistency and flavor.

They had samples to taste and I surprised myself by liking the hickory syrup they were selling. Hickory syrup is an old process for making syrup that was popular before 1850. Basically, you remove some bark from the hickory tree, roast it in an oven, then soak it in water to make a tea. You strain out the solids, add sugar, and cook it down until it has the consistency you like. Now a days it's called Grandma's syrup because only the older Grandma's would take the time to make it. I got some as a novelty, it has a unique smoky sweet flavor.

 Then we went to a modern day operation, wow! Here you can see the tubing on one of the trees and then you can see that tubing weaving in and out, connecting all the maple trees together.

Tubes were running everywhere but they eventually led here, to the Sugar Shack. Starting in the 1970's, some maple syrup producers started using reverse osmosis to remove water from the sap before it would be boiled down. Reverse osmosis allows approximately 75% to 80% of the water to be removed prior to boiling.

Here's a video of the pumps in action:

And what festival could be complete without vendors? We parked and then wandered around the main street, oohing and ahhing at all the different items for sale. One vendor was making baby rattles with his foot powered lathe. He made it look so easy that of course I wanted to try when he asked for volunteers. FYI, I had been "working" a lot longer than this video shows but phew, it was tiring work!

A fun day and I learned a lot.