Calling to give me an update, Blume recounts that our previous phone chat nearly ruined a batch. "I was about five seconds too late, and it started to burn." But he bottled it, and it tastes amazing, with a subtle note of burnt caramel. After several years, and having each batch come out differently, but always superb, he has reached one conclusion: "It's pretty hard to fuck up maple sap." Some of that extra-dark batch is likely destined to become caramel candy: boiled down even further, then mixed with heavy cream and rolled in cocoa or chopped nuts.
Herb Van Baren makes syrup for a living under the Oliverea Schoolhouse Maple label. It's the best syrup I've ever tasted, and I'm not alone in that opinion. It's rich, complex, and subtle. With about 4,000 taps spread across four sugar bushes, he averages about a thousand gallons of syrup each season, though it fluctuates dramatically depending on the weather. He uses vacuum pumps on his trees, which doubles the sap yield, and has a reverse osmosis machine (as do most commercial operations) that removes about 75 percent of the water before he begins boiling. Some companies remove more, but Van Baren feels that some flavors are lost without sufficient time spent over a wood fire in a traditional evaporator: "Boiling develops flavor," he says, especially in the case of a basic rig like Blume's, where tongues of smoke curl over the pan and impart their taste to the result. Van Baren is particularly excited about this year's batch. "It's mostly light amber, and it's got the maple, the vanilla, and the butter" flavors, with all three more pronounced and balanced than normal. Asked why his is so good, he credits geography. "It's the trees and the soil, the glacial till in the Catskills."
Van Baren still finds himself adding more taps each year, using buckets because he has no more tubing. "It's a sickness," he laughs, using the same word Blume does to describe the creeping increase in ambition that seems inevitably to attend the tapping of sap. For aspiring sugar makers, Van Baren counsels a hot fire, a hydrometer, and a proper syrup filter that removes the tiny particles known as maple sand. Thus far, Blume has made do with only the fire, and it's hard to argue with his admittedly unscientific results. It's pretty magical really, unlike any other agricultural process in this part of the world (birch syrup is also good, but the reduction ratio is closer to 100 to 1) and it's a completely renewable resource. Meantime, however, there are not a lot of DIY food projects that offer more reward: you drill holes in a tree and sugar pours out. There's gold in them thar hills.
This dish is a real treat, and features some of the best food our region has to offer in the last days of winter. Parsnips are best left in the ground until March, and then dug up as soon as the ground softens; in winter they convert their starches to sugar to keep from freezing. Your garden can thus offer you fabulous food before a single seed goes in the ground. I like to steam them over maple sap, them blend them smooth with the sap and a little cream. Push them through a sieve for an extra-velvety texture. Wild chives are probably growing around the edges of your yard, and they last all winter. They're one of my all-time favorite wild foods, and ubiquitous, unlike their cousin the ramp.