Feature recipe:
I'm adding one more maple recipe. This quick bread is one of my favorites. It has a fine texture, with a nutty, slightly sweet taste, but it is not so sweet that it couldn't be used for sandwich bread. Click on the title above or on the left side of the page to open the recipe.
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Many moons ago, I lived and worked at a school on the
Leelanau Peninsula called SOLAR that was established on three farms. On one of the hills overlooking the main farm was a grove of sugar maples, or a Sugarbush, as it's called. Each year while snow was still on the ground, but the weather was beginning to warm a bit, we tapped the trees, collected the sap, and hauled it to the sugar shack on toboggans where it was boiled down to make syrup. Our method was an old one that took many days and nights of carefully tending the sap as it boiled. Modern maple syrup producers use evaporators that reduce the sap to syrup or sugar almost instantaneously.
That's me and Michael Creamer, the son of the school's founders, testing the syrup in the latter stage of the process. The initial boiling was done in a very large pan. I believe it was about 5x8x1'. Someone had to sit up with it all night, for several nights until all the collected sap had been boiled down.
One peculiar bit of information: adding milk to the syrup clarifies it. Somehow the milk gathers up all the impurities in the syrup. When it rises to the top it's skimmed off.
An average sugar maple yields from 10 to 20 gallons of sap. It takes 35 to 50 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup. Now you know why it's so expensive.
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Apple Cinnamon Walnut Cake
Sausage Vegetable Soup
Skillet Custard Corn Bread
Raw Apple Muffins
Cincinnati Chili
Michigan Chili