Sunday, February 15, 2009
Cooking with Maple Sap?
It's the middle of February and soon the maple trees will come to life. Even now if you take a look at a maple you will see that the flowering buds are all over the tree. Sap should be flowing shortly. Commercially they tap maple trees to collect sap for making maple syrup, but I'd like to try getting some unrefined sap for cooking. I read of a legend where maple syrup was discovered by Native Americans long ago. In that time clean water was hard to find, and when the sap started running in the maple trees it provided a source of useable water. Meat was cooked by boiling it in maple sap. One day the food was left boiling too long, and the sap boiled down all the way to syrup, that was the start of syrup making. Anyway the Indian way of cooking ought to work just as well today. How about making a pot roast using maple sap instead of water? It ought to add a sweetish maple taste to it. If you have a maple tree there are lots of websites that show you how to tap it. Commercial syrup makers tap sugar maple trees but if you don't have that the common silver maple trees that are in about everybody's yard ought to produce sap suitable for drinking or cooking. The tubes that tap the trees are called spiles, you ought to be able to get a metal tube from a hardware store that would be suitable as a spile if you don't have a real commercial spile. I tried tapping a silver maple tree once but I only got about a cupful of sap. Maybe the next try will work better.
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5 comments:
I just talked to somebody with maple trees and apparently the sap is running right now and has been for the last week.
For an interesting article on Black Walnut sap, see:
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-26363052_ITM
"Experimental tapping of black walnut (Juglans nigra L.) trees has shown that there is a substantial amount of sap flow in young black walnut trees and that it can be tapped and processed for the making of sugar syrup"
I got a couple gallons of maple sap. First thing I tried, I had some fresh enoki mushrooms so in a cast iron skillet I sauteed that in a little vegetable oil. Then poured in a little less than a cup of maple sap. Got that boiling for 3-4 minutes or so. Then put in some coarse ground corn meal enough to soak up the liquid. Once the liquid got soaked up it started frying. Kept on low heat for a couple minutes. Tasted OK, not sure how much maple flavor I could taste.
Next I tried this, put a cup and a half of maple sap in the cast iron skillet. Added a little vegetable oil. Boiled it for about 3 minutes. Then put in corn meal enough to soak up the liquid. Kept on low heat for another few minutes,
It seemed to have a little bit of maply sweetness, though I don't know if I'm really tasting this or if it's my imagination. I need to make this with and without maple sap to see if any one can taste the difference. Tastes OK though.
Next tried this with flour instead of corn meal, turned into kind of lumpy gravy liquid that stuck to the pan too much as it dried. Still it had a bit of maple sweetness.
In a cast iron skillet I sauteed a pound of beef stew meat then poured in a couple cups of maple sap, enough to cover. Boiled it at high heat until liquid was half reduced, then put in another cupful of sap. Kept boiling until the liquid was almost completely evaporated. The finished meat had a nice maple glaze. Excellent taste but the meat was too tough due to the high heat. I'll try this again using low heat.
If you have maple sap, you can drink it too. It's basically just clean pure water with a little sweetish taste. Somebody told me it's 3% sugar.
I made another try at cooking meat by boiling it in maple sap. It works but it takes a long time to boil down the sap at low heat . If you want a maple glaze to meat it’s easier to just use maple syrup to start with.
I’ve been using the sap to make corn meal mush for breakfast, that works about as well as anything. I just put the sap in a skillet and get it to boil then pour in the corn meal to get mush. Maybe a little oil to fry it. Tastes a little sweeter than making corn meal mush with water.
Thanks to Carroll County Farms for providing me with maple sap. They have been making maple syrup all month and should have some for sale when the Lafayette Farmer’s Market opens up in May.
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