Sugar means a lot to our life. Syrup is one of the very important form of sugar. People need this kind of sugar but very few people know the exact process of making syrup. Once you have collected sap from the sugar bush, your making maple syrup just gets start. First select spot to create an outdoor fire pit or a shed with a heat source. Both of them are available. However, please be sure that if you’re making syrup inside a shed, sap evaporation will easily cause a very sticky film on walls, floors and furniture. It is very hard to clean up.

Put sap you collected into a large pot then begin boiling down it over good fire. During cooking, you need to skim froth on the top of your sap with a strainer and discard. While you are cooking down the sap mixed with syrup, put more sap if possible to keep moving. But if you are short of raw sap and the syrup in the pot is getting thickening up to the desired consistency, you should take all of them into a conventional stove in order to controlling temperature more precisely.

Then you should get prepared to move the maple syrup to the finishing pot as long as it has reached the temperature of 6 degrees above the water boiling point . But this point varies on the location and altitude you are standing at. So instead of old timer, you had better use candy thermometer which will help you determine the right temperature.

Filter does not mean you have finished it. You also need to pouring the syrup through fabric. A double thickness of cheesecloth is ideal material for this job or any kind of fine meshed. So clean up the fabric while holding back sand grain sized impurities. In some folks convention there are filtering twice : moving the syrup into the finishing pot and pouring into storage containers.

Maple syrup can be frozen so you can easily make it into sugar crystals by separating or drying out completely in the freezer. Refrigerator is the most common tool for this job, syrup can stay fresh for even 3-4 months without losing taste in standard syrup container. But in any situation be sure let the syrup cool off into natural temperature.The best bet for maple syrup storage is the preservation method for ‘canning’. Do not think it is funny but it is real indeed . By this method your syrup will stay fresh for a full year.

The last but still important step is pouring into hot, sterilized mason jars, sealing with a standard, softened lid ( they can be bought separately ). The storage should be dark avoiding too much sunshine to guarantee its freshness for long time.