VIDEO!!

Moving to Berkeley from Kevin M on Vimeo.

Goodbye dear apartment!

Well, it's 11:30, things are packed, and cleaned. I've shut the door
to 109 Prospect SE for the last time.

My feelings? Sad. Tired. Excited. Slightly overwhelmed (not an
abnormal feeling for me).

I had a great last day at Baudville. Much love to all of my friends
that I said goodbye to today. Great, great people.

Tomorrow AM it's up early and hitting the road. I've packed in as much
stuff as possible, but my car still seems to be hanging in there. I'm
hoping I make good progress tomorrow.

For now, I'm tired. Here's a video of the last time I'll ever shut the
door at 109 Prospect :(

<3

1/6

Well, today is the big move day. Lindsay and I woke up at 5, grabbed our bags, brushed our teeth, and ran to the airport.

Except we also stopped for gas on the way, and while I pumped gas I left the lights on. Then the car died. And then I had to wait to find somebody to jump us. And then we missed our flight!

Good news though, we caught a flight two hours later (on standby, and it was close!)!! So I'm now typing this from O'hare. We are about to board our connecting flight to SFO.

Arrival time in SF: 1:10 pm local time.

kevin makes maple syrup

THERE IS NO SPACE FOR THE PICTURES UP HERE, SCROLL DOWN!!!































KEEP SCROLLING, ALMOST THERE!!













OK! YOU DID IT!!!







So, I wanted to get off my computer today and get outside and take some photos, and I figured I'd take photos along my daily maple syrup collection run. I have always loved maple candy, and when I realized I could make it pretty easily from scratch from home, I was quite excited. After I had actually made it the first time and realized how easy it was to produce a "real" maple candy I was even more excited.

So, let us start at the beginning...



First thing to do, is find a maple tree - preferably a "Sugar Maple" - [i]Acer saccharum[/i] or almost as good a Black Maple. I happen to live in suburbia and my backyard happens to contain (what I believe to be) Black Maples - [i]Acer nigrum[/i]. These will do nicely. I'm no tree expert, but all I'm really concerned with is the sugar content - sugar maples arguably have a slightly higher sugar content which ranges from around 2-4ish percent. This number isn't a solid number, and the percentage can vary from day to day, tree to tree, season to season.


Here I'm going to tap a biggerish tree - but don't be fooled, big trees aren't always better producers. In my limited experience (about 9 or 10 seasons but only 15 or so trees a year, and always the same trees) most of our best producing trees are smaller trees, and trees that get lots of light. This is my personal experience, so before starting a sugar bush I recomend consulting wikipedia or something.



Next step in making maple candy is to drill a hole in the tree (not pictured). This is pretty easy, but please consult wikipedia or the closest male role model in your life who is handy with tools - preferably an "old timer". The size of the hole you drill (and the "drill [b]bit[/b]" you select) will depend on which type of spile you use. Spiles are (were?) the metal bits you put in the tree that help you collect the sap.



Now days, we use plastic spiles. The reason? Well, in my case, i'm not sure. My pa picked these up. Like me he's a bit of a nerd, and these are what most big operations use. HOWEVER, the reason they use these is because big maple syrup places use connected tubing lines and huge vacumes to collect their sap. They use these plastic spiles and fit tubing onto it, then network all of the tubing together, and ta da - no need to collect syrup. In our case, we use the spiles but without the intended benfit. Just the same, the plastic spile + tube combined do make taking buckets off/on to collect easier. I pounded a spile into the tree.



Attach some tubing to the spile - we just buy this stuff at the hardware store. I don't know if it's food grade, but I haven't died yet, or gotten sick which is great because my health insurance sucks at the moment.


Next up, we need a 5 gallon bucket. Or a bunch of them actually. These are best acquired at a hardware store I've found, because you can get them new with lids for 2 or 3 bucks if you shop around a bit. I'm sure you can probably get them for free if you know a builder or better yet a house painter, but check wikipedia.



Pound a nail in the tree (not pictured) and tie a rope to the bucket (not pictured) and put the whole thing together (not not pictured). It should look something like this:


The next step of course is to do this to as many maple trees as you can find. Hell, if you feel like it tap some birch trees as well, they'll make a nice syrup, but have about half the sugar content of sugar/black maples. Also they have a shorter "season", and considering I live in proximity of a muck field (wet, black, dirty dirt) and birch require sandier soils so don't have any, I'm not tapping any. That's what she said. As I mentioned, we tap around 15 trees in my backyard, which is pretty awesome considering we're surrounded by houses and are pretty much the only ones around with actual woods in our backyard (pictured).



[b]HEY THERE'S ONE, THROUGH THOSE BUSHES!![/b]



Depending on the day/year/week/month/how much you've sinned you're going to get around 30-50:1 ratio of sap to syrup. Syrup is around 66+2/3 sugar, and 33+1/3 water. So really, you want to be collecting as much sap as you can. If you have a single maple tree in your front yard and that's ALL you have, it still might be fun to top the tree just for the experience, but I wouldn't expect more then a breakfast worth of sap from an entire season. For us, 15 trees is enough to make 36 candies on a REALLY GOOD day, but more like 8-10 candies a day, sometimes less. Honestly, it's hard to say because I don't really keep track of how much syrup we get a year, and because we have a very small sample of trees we don't really have a buffer of any sort. The rules that apply to large samples don't really apply to us.



So the fun part, one of the parts that I really enjoy about making maple candy, is collecting the sap. I spend a retarded (see wikipedia) number of hours on my computer, and it's nice to have a reason to make myself go outside and get some fresh air. Collecting sap only takes 30-45 minutes normally, but it's still nice. Sap should be collected daily as it can go bad if left out too long. Sorry about the photo, I was my own photographer and I think my camera shifted as I was running to "pose" - again, soft wet dirt. This was film, so I didn't notice the missed focus until 4 hours later. I normally collect sap in 2 5 gallon buckets, when there's snow on the ground I use a large sled my dad uses for hunting. On a really good day, I can fill 2-3 5 gallon buckets with sap. Today was not so good and I got less then a bucket. :(. (on second thought, the photo sort of looks tilt shifted or something. sweet!)



Next, stand on a tree*
*[i]not required[/i]**
[img]http://www.shoelessone.com/jpg/blog/14.jpg[/img]


You may notice that the sap you've collected has stuff in it. Spiders, ants, bark, very small rocks, all par for the course. You'll want to strain these things out. My preferred method is using a colander with some muslin or cheese cloth in it. It's not perfect, but it's good enough. This is real maple candy, if there are some specs of dirt in there all the better. I normally strain my sap once in the beginning, and then just before moving inside for the final boil (more on that later).



A note: you may find that some of your sap is a bit "yellow" looking. Sometimes I get sap that looks pretty disgusting to be honest, really dark, almost like urine. I don't know the science behind this, but apparently that's normal. I'm not convinced that it's not just from rainwater getting into the bucket or something, but some of the bigger operations we've called and asked said that the yellow sap is normal, and like most other things sap related, when/where yellow sap shows up seems to be random. I'm a scientist, so I tend to thing it must have something to do with soil acidity or iron content or again, the fact that I'm not a religious man, or something. I'll have to check wikipedia. Here is a picture of the sap, but you can also see it in the above photo. "normal" sap will be clear like water most of the time. I hear the yellow sap might produce a more earthy flavor, we mix all of our sap together so I can't personally tell.



Now these next two photos are sort of misleading, because I normally have both of things happening at the same time: when it's cold outside, I heatup the sap on our inside burning just until it starts to start to almost start boiling. The idea is to save propane tank refills by doing some of the heating inside, without having the gallons and gallons and gallons of water in the form of steam in our kitchen. You may be able to tell this sap is clear, not yellow, like above. Oh, FYI, you can sometimes taste a sweetness to the sap. YMMV.


[i]...meanwhile outside....[/i]

We have a good ol' campmore stove that we use for boiling our sap. It can get a bit expensive, normally we go through about 3 gas grill sized canisters a year, and that varies. BUT, it fits the boiling pan we have, it's easy to maintain, water proofish, and we can just leave it outside on our deck night/day. When the sap is really running this thing is on pretty much all day until we go to bed. The way we boil our sap may not be the best, we generally just keep adding new sap to the pan for a few days, then every 3 days or so we finish up the sap inside. We finish it inside just so we can keep a better eye on it.



Once the sugar content goes up, so does the temperature of the liquid and therefor the rate at which water boils off. That's part of the reason we boil just keep adding the sap instead of starting a new batch everyday - it's more efficient (I think). I THINK that once the temperature reaches around 219 degrees you're basically done. This isn't acurate probably, so double check, and really its the diferential between boiling water and 66+2/3 sugar boiling that you should be concerned with, but I'm not sure of either number at my location so oh well.



Actually, at this point we're almost done! I've sort of tricked you into reading this thread, but in all honestly making the candy is the easiest part of this whole thing. You need a thermometer (I use a wireless meat probe I got off of Woot! because I'm a nerd) and it seems to get the job done, syrup (or sap or wahtever you want to call it), and a tablespoon of butter. Oh, and some molds. 2-3 cups made around 36 small candies. Surprisingly, not that much volume was lost when going from syrup to candy. The rough proportions are 2 cups of syrup to 1 tablespoon of butter. I'd err on the side of not enough butter. The butter helps keep the maple candy from becoming super hard, and it makes it melt in your mouth moor. It also can go rancid, so feel free to leave out the butter if you want. Too much butter makes the candy not set as well, break apart to easy, etc. Though, too much butter also makes the candy REALLY melt in your mouth - taste ++. The basic process here is easy:
1) put all ingredients into a pan that is plenty roomy as this will boil up a bit
2) put a wooden spoon in pan as some magic makes the syrup not boil up as much if you do this
3) put on medium-low heat. Don't turn the heat up too high, however if you don't turn it up high enough you may find yourself sitting by the stove for 10 hours as you slowly, slowly gain a degree here and a degree there.
4) [b]Our goal is approx 233-234 degrees[/b, or more. google for a maple candy recipe and you'll find a few different temperatures ranging from 230-240 degrees I'd say. I've found 233 is perfect. But not less then that, honestly. Less than that and you won't have boiled off enough water and the candy won't set properly.
5) I find stirring to be a good thing, but I've also made candy without stiring at all.
6) The last step, after your candy/syrup/whatever reaches 234ish degrees is to move the stuff to a container that is easy to poor from, and then STIR the stuff for 4-8 minutes, or longer, depending on how much stuff you have. You want to introduce small air bubbles into the candy and also start the cooling process. Do this with a wooden spoon. You might be able to get away without doing this bit, or without using a wooden spoon, but it seems to make sense to me to start cooling this at an even rate so that you dont poor the candy and have butter/water/sugar separate at all. (BTW, in the photo you'll see I set the thermometer alarm to 220 - this is the point that often times the syrup starts boiling up quite a bit more. things get worse from this point on, so it's a good idea to keep an eye to make sure things don't boil over and explode your house) Once the syrup/precandy/whatever has started to lighten a bit in color and turn opaqueish...



Now, poor stuff into molds. I like metal molds because they don't melt (either would silicone, or plastic probably, but metal REALLY won't melt!!!! METAL IS AWESOME). Now, I have a secret to tell you: what i'm pooring in this photo is Meijers brand store bought maple syrup that was like a $1.50. I poured the molds already when I was taking photos, but wanted to have something to demonstrate the pouring process, so I used a stand-in-syrup. Oh lord, I am sorry for I have sinned and mislead the readers into thinking I was pouring REAL syrup/precandy/almostcandy into the molds. The stuff you see IN the molds behind the mold I'm pouring into is real maple candy that had already been sitting for an hour or so. The real stuff will be more opaque and a bit less shiny. After 30 minutes or less (if you've heated your syrup long enough) the liquid syrup will start really turning light color and totally opaque. This is great!



I'd wait overnight if you can handle it, then demold. If your candy is wet/not solid, you did something wrong. Most likely you didn't get the syrup hot enough, or you didn't cool it enough before stirring, or you used too much butter. Good news is you can start from step 18 or so, and not step 1.



You could always use store bought pure maple syrup if you wanted, but that's not as much fun.

**ACTUALLY REQUIRED

thanks for the disk and card scott, it meant a very lot to me. i am not sure how to fully thank you, but I figured a post here after a long time with no purpose other than to say thank you to you, scott, would be a small start. I don't know if you ever check this, but if you do, this will be here.

C.Darwin to A.Gray

C.Darwin to A.Gray:

With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.--I am bewildered.--I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I sh^d wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me .... But the more I think the more bewildered I become; as indeed I have probably shown by this letter.¹⁰