Maine Maple Sunday and Pouding Chomeur

By Ladleah Dunn

For the past few months, depending on where you live, sugar bushes everywhere are laced with networks of tubing, pots, pans, buckets, and other catchment devices for the collection of maple sap. Be the sugar bush a couple of trees in your yard or a full on grove of maple trees, listen closely and you can hear the drip, drip of sap flowing.

There has been great debate and controversy surrounding this years tapping season. Too warm. The trees never needed to store up the usual amounts of sugar to get them through the winter- resulting in watery sap. Let’s be clear- maple tree sap is just a few degrees away from water as it is. A typical ratio for reducing sap to the wonderful brown syrup we pour (if you are me- on everything) is 40 gallons of sap to 1 gallon of syrup. I’ve been hearing figures as high as 80:1 this year from Vermont to New York.  Devastating for those maple syrup producers. Here in mid-coast Maine we lucked out. My husband and I have been tapping a few trees for our own pleasure and fun and it was a good year. Beginners luck I suppose but we managed to eek out the season with 1 gallon and 1 pint of lovely brown maple syrup having boiled down 38 gallons of sap. The last 4 gallons of fresh sap went into a rich Maple Nut Brown Ale, but that is another story…

Our local, friendly Agway has everything one could want to tap a tree (all varieties of maples are fair game or even birch! Check out Euell Gibbons).

When the nights are still dipping below freezing and the days just poking above freezing go looking for a tree larger than 9 inches in diameter. Drill a 1/2 inch hole about 1 1/2 inches deep, tunk your tap in and start collecting. We used food safe tubing bought at Agway and drilled holes into the lid of a new five gallon bucket. Great for keeping bits of bark and creepy crawlies out. Clean milk jugs or the old fashioned tinned buckets all work well. We found that we needed to check the buckets twice a day to keep up with the flow. We would immediately come home and pour the sap into a big pot over a propane burner. The method we worked out was to fill the pot in the morning and light the fire letting it reduce all day. By bed time (9-ish: we wake up early!) we would have finished syrup. This allowed us to get work done during the day without paying much attention to the boil, but as the liquid became more concentrated (dinner time) we were around to monitor its cooking and adjust the heat if it was looking close to being done. The best part of making syrup is seeing and tasting as the day goes on the progression from a very watery liquid to nearly pure sugar. We do NOT recommend cooking the syrup off inside as you are basically driving off through boiling nearly 98% water. Makes for a drippy house. To tell if the syrup is done a candy thermometer comes in handy, looking for a reading of around 210F. If you don’t have one of these a chilled saucer works well, simply dribble some syrup on and let cool. It really is up to you how thick you’d like it, but over cooking results in hard candy so keep an eye on it and test often until you have reached done-ness. It’s an awful job having to taste spoonful after spoonful of warm syrup.

It’s hard deciding how to enjoy your fresh syrup.  I settled on a recipe beloved by my grandmother, known to us as Beechburg Pudding, to others as Pouding Chomeur.  A humble food, born from a time when syrup was a rural (poor) persons sweetener, not the expensive gourmet treat it is today.  This simple but incredibly rich and delicious dessert warms the soul on a cool, rainy March day such as this.  For this recipe look for the darkest syrup you can find.  Get out and go visit and support those folks in the sugar shacks today.  Thank them for all the hard work it takes to make the humble maple syrup.

adapted from Gourmet Magazine

• 1 1/4 cups pure maple syrup (amber or Grade B)
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 2 teaspoons cider vinegar
• Pinch of salt
• 3/4 stick (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla

• 1 cup cake flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Put oven rack in upper third of oven and preheat oven to 350°F.

Stir together maple syrup, heavy cream, cider vinegar, and pinch of salt in a small saucepan and bring to a boil, then remove from heat.

Beat together butter and sugar in a bowl with an electric mixer until light and fluffy, about 1 minute. Add egg and vanilla, then beat until just combined (batter will be very thick).

Sift flour, baking powder, and salt together into egg mixture and stir with a rubber spatula until just combined.

Pour 1/3 cup syrup mixture into baking dish. Divide batter in bowl into 6 mounds with rubber spatula and spoon each mound onto syrup mixture in baking dish, spacing mounds evenly. Pour remaining syrup mixture over and around mounds.

Bake until topping is golden and firm to the touch, 35-40 minutes. Serve warm, with crème fraîche.