How to Drink a Tree's Blood

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- Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and we're talking today about maple syrup, and I'm not going to lie to you, dare listeners. I want something maple right now.

- I need to. This was, I don't know if this came from a listener, or it came from many listeners, or just my own brain, but we, not even thinking, I just threw this one to Libya,

kind of forgetting that, I don't want to give, I don't want to dox Libya, but let's just say she lives in the New England area. - Uh-huh, sure. - So she was like, oh yeah, baby, right at my alley, let's do it.

- Yeah, I have the impression that she'll eat a thing of maple cotton candy from the H.E. and a tour. - Yeah, I could feel the joy coming through

Libya's keyboard in this one, which is always nice.

- For sure, and the timing's amazing too, because the sugaring season is basically just wrapped up

“as far as I can tell, and I think it was a good one.”

- Yeah, yeah. - Libya also just says a little thing. Remember, we've said that she always has great titles. - And this one was, how did drink a trees blood? - Yeah, I think that's gonna be the title.

- Oh, okay, okay, good. - I mean, I might put in parentheses, maple syrup, you sicko, or something like that. - Sure, I like that. - Anytime sicko ends up in a title,

I think something great has happened. - Including the movie, sicko. - So, is there a movie called sicko? - Yeah, wasn't that one that won a Harmony Carines, maybe, or Carine?

- I don't know. - I think so. - No, no, that was Michael Moore, sorry. - Michael, oh yeah, yeah. - The documentary. - Yeah, yeah, about the American healthcare system

and how broken it is, yeah. So, Chuck, all right, so let's talk about maple syrup. We both want some maple syrup. This is fair warning to anyone listening. You're gonna want something maple,

“and that's okay, it's okay to want something maple,”

even if you don't have it. - That's right, but if we're gonna start with maple syrup, we gotta start with the maple tree. There are all kinds of maple trees, but if you, and you can get sugary sap

from other kinds of maple trees, but if you want the real gold, and if you want the real gold standard industry wide, you're gonna tap into that sweet, sweet sugar maple, the acer saccharum, because that's the one

that has the real good stuff. That has the highest concentration of sugar and it's sap, and like you said, you might tap a red maple, if that's all you got around, but you need a lot more of it to end up with what you want.

So you really wanna, you really want that sugar maple. - Right, and if you say okay, guys, I'll find a sugar maple where do I go? They're all over the place, actually. They have a pretty great range.

We're talking about North America, Northern North America, which includes the Northeastern U.S., Southeastern Canada, we're talking New Brunswick. We're talking Nova Scotia. - Yeah.

- Don't leave out Quebec, because Southern Quebec is the far and away, the largest producer of maple syrup in the world, parts of Ontario, and then Maine, all the way down North Carolina, you can find sugar maples.

There are some places that sugar maples grow that they're not going to, they're not gonna make maple syrup as much there,

to the actual tree itself. There are environmental conditions, climate conditions that have to take place, and they're so variable that maple syrup production, and maple sugar production, has resisted industrialization

throughout its lifetime, and that just makes me cheer. - Yeah, because it's like,

“you have to tap a tree that grows in the woods to do that,”

and I bet they've tried, but they haven't figured out a way to build a factory around a forest with trees going through it. - Yeah, as far as I know, no one's tried that. Well, I guess the bio dome kind of counts.

- Yeah, probably so. But what we're about to describe everybody is one of the wonders of nature. I didn't know anything about this stuff, so it was all new to me,

and I was kind of blown away. It was kind of a mind bomb, if you will, for me. The magic to the maple syrup, obviously, is that sap. And that sap has a very specific function in a tree. The sap wood is a part of the tree.

It's also called a xylam. It's in that tree trunk just outside of the heartwood, and it has tissue in that sap wood, in the zylam that moves water and minerals around from the roots to the leaves.

It's kind of like the freeway system, if you will. - Yeah, it's circulatory system. Hormones too, that's what sap is. It's minerals, water, hormones. All the stuff that the trees moving to itself

to help repair wounds and to produce photosynthesis, and then also move the products from photosynthesis,

“which is like starches, back down to the roots, right?”

So you've got stuff moving up and down the tree trunk. But if you walk up to a sugar maple in the summer, and you put a tap into it, it's good to just be like, that was useless and to kind of hurt. There's a specific time when you want to tap a sugar maple

to get the constituent maple sap. - That's right, and that is in the major producing parts, which is what we described before. That will be a generally between like February and April with a peak in March.

And that is because, and this is the second sort

of astounding part of this stuff. That xylom, that sap would, it's moving stuff all around, but it's also really good at holding energy reserves during times where it needs it. - Right.

- So they're the cells called Ray Perincoma that use enzymes that turn those starches, Josh was talking about into sugars, and it's a great way to store that energy, but that sugar also protects the tissue

from freezing during the winter. So it's just sort of sitting there like, in the perfect conditions waiting to be tapped in those months. - Yeah, because there's this kind of positive pressure that builds up in the tree,

because on nights where it's freezing,

“and that turn into days that get above freezing, right?”

So when the icicles start to really drip, I've seen, that the sap itself starts moving up and down, and when it moves up, normally when there's leads on the tree,

transpiration, or basically a evaporation at the leaf surface,

that relieves that pressure. But remember, this is a time when the sugar maples don't have leaves yet, so it can't kind of relieve that pressure and the pressure builds up and builds up.

And so if you go to a sugar maples, it's specifically the right time. When it's freezing at night, not freezing in the day, and you put a tap into it, that's when the sap's gonna come out.

And like you said, those starches have been converted to sugars as energy stores, so that's also when the sap is going to be at its weakest. There is a couple of weeks that you can tap a specific kind of tree in a specific location

under specific climate conditions to get the sap you're gonna need to make maple syrup. And I mean, I just love maple syrup so much more than I did before. - Yeah, for sure.

It's once those conditions leave that step, it didn't dry up, but it stops running freely. If you could get to it, it wouldn't taste the same, like you said, it would be kind of bitter, but you can't get to it anyway.

And it's just like a seasonal cycle. Like this is when the trees are beginning to bud again.

Like we said, it peaks in March, basically.

And if you, let's say you tap to tree and you've got a little bit of that good stuff and you put it on your tongue, it wouldn't taste like the final result. It's sweet, you can taste the sweetness,

but it's about the sap ranges from about one to three percent of that sweetness at that point. So like it needs to be processed after that point, 'cause what you really wanna get it to is a sugar concentration of about 66%.

- Yeah. - Which means you have to boil it. You have to boil down about 40 gallons to get one gallon of syrup. - Yeah, there's actually, there's this maple syrup

researcher from the turn of last century named CW Jones. And he came up with what's called the Jones Rule of 86. And I'm not sure how it works, it seems a little magical, but you can take the percentage of sugar

that you just got out of the tree and multiply that percentage by 86. And it will tell you how many gallons you need to boil down to get one gallon

“of maple syrup at 66% sugar concentration.”

- That's right. And usually it's about that 40 gallon range. - Yeah.

- People have, you know, we're not the first person

to enjoy this stuff. It has a very long history among indigenous North American groups. And they used it for all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of different stories like, like, you know, who's the first person

to eat a oyster, like, how do they figure out this tree sap with something you wanted? Like the first person to tap it. And it probably, no one knows for sure. It probably happened by accident.

There's a lot of stories. One of them is that there was a Tomahawk in a tree that Tomahawk got pulled out. And they're just happened to be a container below it that caught that sap and some indigenous version was like,

oh, let me take that water that's in this bucket from the rain and boil some meat for dinner. And they're like, wait a minute.

“This is like, you know, it has a sweet taste to it.”

So it was a complete accident. It's kind of a nice story. My money's probably on just another kind of accident. Maybe someone just sort of tasted it with your finger because a woodpecker pecked a hole in a tree.

And they're like, hey, maybe we can use this something. Because they had long-use saps and gums for other things. So it wasn't like any big revelation that something from a tree was useful. Sure. Yeah, totally.

That's a good point. Another suggestion is that somebody noticed a sap cycle and tried that because the sugar content of the sap itself has a lower freezing point than the water. So the water separates out as it freezes.

And then the sap, the sugary sap eventually freezes more with a higher concentration of sugar. And if somebody broke that off and looked at it, they'd be like, we need to get to the bottom of what's going on here because this is the dish.

I would love a real skeptical, maybe fun. We should also say that the Europeans who came over

“to colonize North America got this learned about maple syrup.”

Directly from the indigenous people who were here like the Abanaki, the Howden of Sony, the Ojibwa, the Algonquin. All of them had methods and techniques for getting maple sap out of sugar maple trees.

And they had like their own techniques. Each group had a slightly different technique.

But ultimately, what it usually boiled down to

was cutting a laceration in the bark of the tree, possibly putting like a hollow twig in there to serve as the tap. Sometimes they just let it trickle down the bark of the tree. And then they would usually catch it in like a little birch

bark container. The ones that I saw looked like little tiny row boats, which I bet you could use as row boats after the sugar ring season. That's right.

After they got that sap, you know, like I said, it was still, you still have to process it and boil it down. There were different techniques that they used, you know, depending what tribe you were from. But one of them most certainly was probably

putting heated rocks into a container and kind of boiling and evaporating out the water that way. A lot slower process actually. In fact, sometimes they would just put it over hot fire and let it happen.

Sometimes they would just leave it out in the sun and take like the real slow roll approach to get the water out of there. - Yeah, also they, they, from that, I guess the sap's a cool kind of thing.

They figured out that you could also freeze it out. Like you could freeze the water out, remove the ice,

and you just basically evaporated a bunch of water

from the sap. So there was probably different techniques that could also be combined to just to get it more and more closer to what you wanted. And we should say that the indigenous peoples

of North America who were doing this pre-contact, they were not making syrup nearly as much from what we understand. They were making this into sugar. Sugar cakes, granulated sugar.

They were making sugar out of the maple sap, which is essentially the same thing. You're boiling it down further than you would syrup, but you let it dry. Once it gets to a thick and state,

you let it dry, then you break it up and you've got maple sugar on your hands. - Specifically for one tribe, it was sort of a seasonal shift for the OG Way people. Like in the winter time, they would break up

into smaller groups of like a dozen or so and travel around and hunt and ice fish and stuff like that. And in the spring, they would come back together and form like these bigger communities. And that sugaring process and tapping those trees

was kind of the first big thing that they did. So they could store it as long as possible, hopefully all year long. And then they're other spring and summer stuff, like plant and harvest and stuff like that.

of the coming back together, which is kind of cool.

“- That's another thing I love about it is that's what it's called.”

When you go and you collect the sap to maple syrup or maple sugar from, it's called the sugaring season, the place where you boil down the saps, called the sugar shack, the sugar bush. - Yeah, the stand of trees of sugar maples,

together it's called the sugar bush, kind of like a wooded area, another name for that, not the evergreen scrub bush that's found out in Chaparau Country. This is just a group of sugar maples together in an area.

That's your sugar bush. I just love this whole thing. - Yeah, when they would pass it back and forth, they would say give me some sugar baby. (laughing)

- That's right. - I love it. The word sugar is a very pleasing sound to my ear. So I'm sure. - Especially, and also when you think of the snow,

I think of the snow and the maples in the snow, like visually and then thinking of the word sugar with all that stuff too, it's just gosh.

They almost make me want to go do basically move

and buy like a little parcel of land that has a couple of maples on it. And just make like a gallon once a year, something like that. Seems like a lot to do just for a gallon of maple syrup that I could probably buy from somebody else

for much, much cheaper and less effort. But it just seems nice, you know, like a pleasant way to be. - Oh, people do that. I mean, I know in this article Olivia said

that doing it in your house isn't super recommended because all the steam it creates from boiling it down, but I've seen videos like there are definitely people that tap trees on their land and just get small amounts of sugar.

And like, you know, kind of like somebody might get honey from bees and set up a little stand on the side of the road. - Yeah, for sure. I was looking at like a, a sugar ring, I guess, supply house.

And they had like $3,400 of Apparachian pants

that you basically put on like a propane gas,

like heater or burner. And yeah, you could, you could do it wherever.

“But yes, I think I would build a little sugar ring shack.”

Her sugar shack, just a, yeah. - Just a wood burn into a sign to hang over the door that said sugar shack. - Yeah, and if some payouty happened to find its way in there, so be it.

- So we should mention before we take our break. You know, they were obviously eating this stuff in a lot of ways, the indigenous peoples. They were making cornmeal base breads with it. They would put it on all kinds of like meats and fish

and I imagine it tasted just so great. So it was the flavor for them. But it was also a very calorie rich thing in the early spring when their winter food was sort of dwindling.

- Right. - And so you know, and as we'll see later, their health properties too. So they, they probably had a hunch about that as well. - And don't forget the tiny road boats

that you could put in like a lake or a pond after drinking. - That's right, too. - Yeah, let's take that break. All right, we'll be right back and talk more about maple, right after this.

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search, Learn In The Hard Way, and listen to that. (gentle music) (upbeat music) - So Chuck, I said that European colonizers got, they're just total awareness of maple sugaring or surping

from the local indigenous people. One of the things that the local indigenous peoples got from the Europeans were metal pots, which vastly improved the process of making maple syrup and make maple sugar

for the indigenous tribes. Like, no longer did Jeff put a heated rock in some sort of bowl with some sap and just wait like this, this just increased things tremendously. - Yeah, I wonder if they collected in that

or if they stuck to their baby boats. - I hope I hope baby boats, that's my wish. - I think so too. - So early on in that colonization process, the settlers obviously were doing the same thing,

collecting it and using their methods. It was cheaper than importing cane sugar from the Caribbean, which is where that was all coming from. And it became like the de facto sweetener of the United States at some point.

And then later became a sort of a cause and abolitionist cause.

“I think in the 18th century abolitionists and Quakers”

were using like maple, like as a way to say, hey, let's not especially founding father of Benjamin Rush, like hey, let's not support these British slave-based plantations in the Caribbean that we're getting this cane sugar, like we can get our own sweet stuff right here

and export it and not promote slavery and it tastes great. - Yeah, but in that export, if you made enough to export, you could also undercut the sugar market in Great Britain back home. So you were really kind of hobbling

to this slave-based plantation societies by doing that. Thomas Jefferson was like, I'm on board. Let's do this because it fit into his vision of the United States being a collective of young and farmers

who were basically, you know, growing enough for themselves

and a little to sell, they're like, yeah, just plant some sugar maples too and it'll be great. Because one of the things that makes sugar and attractive is that it takes place in this weird in between time and there's normally not a lot to do on a family farm.

Now you have a whole other revenue stream and you're getting a bunch of maple syrup out of it too. Just by sugaring, adding that to like your yearly thing. - So we did mention earlier that, you know, they probably tried to turn this into a large scale thing

but it just failed kind of time after time because it's such a labor-intensive thing. And, you know, as a result, you know,

“maple, you know, I think I said at one point,”

it was like the most common sweetener in the U.S. That kind of started following the way because it's so labor-intensive

and by the second half of the 19th century cane sugar,

prices fell a lot and then beat sugar started being produced. So maple sugar, it just, you know, as far as being a sweetener kind of fell by the way side for a long time. - Yeah.

- But they started, you know, people still like that flavor, especially on things like pancakes and waffles. - Yeah. - So they needed to, to, unfortunately, kind of cut it with other stuff. So they maple producer started cutting it

with that cane sugar I mentioned in corn syrup and that's where we get, you know, Mrs. Butterworth. That's where we get that pancake syrup that we have today. - I have Mrs. Butterworth written right there. - I mean, what else is there?

And I wouldn't think it's called "Anjama" anymore, is it? - No, no, it's, I can't remember what they call, like old mill or something like that. - Yeah, yeah, they changed the name. Here's my secret, like, if I go to the restaurant

and they have the maple syrup at the nice brunch, I love it, I'm not gonna turn my nose up. And I know that's the gold, but man, I love that. That buttery pancake syrup. - Oh yeah, me too.

So I was thinking about what I was raised on. I didn't have a real maple syrup until I was, I don't know, probably in my 40s to tell you the truth.

I finally was like, same.

- I want to see what this, this is like. And I ordered some and it, I mean, it's pretty good, but it is a different animal from what I grew up on, which wasn't even Mrs. Butterworth's. My mom was like, no, that's too expensive.

She would make a one to one simple syrup and then put a little bit of artificial maple flavoring in it. And that was, that is maple syrup to me. And I love it still. Like that's still my favorite kind of syrup.

“- Now, when you say you ordered it, what does that mean?”

Ordered it off the shelf at the grocery store? - No, I ordered some online first, I think, before I noticed that you could get it at grocery store. - Wow, okay. - Yeah, because I'm like organic, real maple syrup,

where you're gonna find that. And apparently, just about everywhere. - Yeah, I mean, we have that stuff around.

And here's what I didn't know either,

is that, I know Canadians and Northeastern people of the United States are probably like, you guys are such a rude. - Oh, they're a gas right now. - But hey, I grew up in Georgia.

Like this just wasn't a thing. It's not a thing down here like it is up there. So I didn't know you had to refrigerate it. So I went through the stage of like, you know, why don't I have mold spores on my maple syrup?

And Mrs. Butterworth is just fine. Sitting right next to it on the shelf. - Yeah, I'm a little nervous about the syrup I got because it's been in my pantry for a long time and it still doesn't have mold.

So it's got like any freeze or something cut into it. - Is this stuff you ordered in your 40s? - Yeah. - You haven't gone through one bottle? - No, I haven't because it is,

it's so different from what I like or what I'm used to as maple syrup that it's like a special kind of thing. It's not what I go for now anytime I'm like syrup. Like it's a, it's a very occasional thing for me.

- Yeah, I'm with you man. I definitely came onto it late and it was definitely like in a restaurant somewhere where they, you know, had it in a little cup on the table next to me.

And I was like, oh, this is really good. In the cup, like a little cello cup. - Not in it, like the little metal ceramic in you know. - I got you, I got you. - Besides the waffle.

- So what's interesting, you kind of said that maple syrup production is kind of slowly but truly kind of bounce back and forth

but never really kind of gotten huge.

I think we've made that point very clearly by now. But in the late 20th century, especially like I think around the 70s, it did kind of get a boost because people were like, you know what? We can use those vacuum pumps that we used to pump milk

on our family farm and plastic tubing that we'll just connect to the taps. And we can make this a lot easier on ourselves because if you are a traditional sugaring operation, you have pails hanging from your taps that's in the tree

“and every day you have to go collect the pails”

and immediately start boiling it so that it doesn't grow bacteria. This is like you just kick back and let it all come to you and it's probably going into a pretty decent size advanced machine that's handling all of the processing

for you as well. - Yeah, for sure, the advent of the reverse osmosis machine became a really big deal because that was just a way more efficient way to remove water from the sap before you boil it down.

So I think they can get about 90% of the water out with the reverse osmosis machine. So that really drastically reduces the boiling time to get down to that really sugary good stuff. - Right.

- And the other thing is back in the day, they had to use wood-fired boilers and stuff like that that they use propane. So lots of little things kind of came along to make it more industrial but still not,

it still trees in a forest that you're tapping. It's not like some big, like I said, like a factory built around it or something. - I was reading a lot of stuff explaining how this whole thing works and one of the sites

that has some good explainers as Greens Sugar House and they still use wood. - Oh really? They said they're one of the few who use wood still. - I wonder if there's a benefit to that

or just they like to be able to school and out that.

“- I think maybe old school, I don't know.”

- Yeah. So all of this put together reverse osmosis, vacuum pumps, plastic tubing, when you combine it by the mid 90s, I think maple syrup production in the US and Canada together increased 400% over just like a couple decades earlier.

So still not industrialized,

with maple syrup and that's definitely what's happening.

- Yeah, for sure. Climate change just put a dent in almost everything and maple industry is no stranger to that, especially in the US, but snow cover is a pretty big deal, so it's not snowing as much and snow cover helps

insulate those roots, so that's not a great thing. The trees are also more affected by disease and invasive species that come with warmer temperatures. And all of this is resulted in, I don't know about a consensus, but a lot of scientists are saying that like,

this may be a Canada-only thing and then not too distant future. Like that ranges reducing and it's reducing northward.

“- Right, remember our plant migration episode?”

It's like that. - Yeah, for sure. - So you said that the range of sugar maples is moving northward, AKA plant migration. There are other things that have happened over the years

with the sugar bushes, remember stands of sugar maples, that we figured out like that's not good, we should try something different.

And these family farmers basically just did something logical

and they're like, well, let's just tear down some of these other trees and plant more sugar maples. And so the sugar bush turned into a very, almost a monoculture basically. The where it was nothing but sugar maples

and that makes sense economically on the short term, but in the long term, it's not good because it reduces biodiversity. - Yeah, for sure. And we should mention there is another plant called a sugar bush

but we're not talking about that, just so. Save hearing mails. - I did, I was talking, it was a, it's a shaper ale plant, it's like scrub bush. - Yeah, who wants that?

- I guess people who like the shaper ale, people who live in like 29 palms? - Yeah, okay.

“So, you know, biodiversity is an important part”

of any thriving ecosystem and sugar maples are no different. Once you simplify that tree species, it's gonna drive out certain kinds of birds and those kinds of birds might be feeding on the invasive

little insect critters. So they need to predict that biodiversity so places are now sort of realizing we need to not just cut down swastow other things to plant sugar maples.

And Vermont is one of them. And they enacted an effort that now requires 25% of trees in a sugar bush to be other species, other than that sugar maples. - Right, yeah.

So that was nice to come full circle like that and realize like, yeah, and you don't want to do that, there's reasons to keep things biodiversity diverse. - I love the wind nature's like,

you know, that's not gonna work. Let's go back to how I had it before. - Yeah, for sure. If you're wondering about the trees themselves, they have to be about 40 years old.

So even when they were planning these things, it takes decades and decades to be able to tap them. And they have to be a certain size. They can only be about 10 inches in diameter. And they're generally only tapped once

unless they're big mama's. If they're over 18 inches, you might be able to tap that thing a second time. - Yeah, which kind of raised the question for me, not big the question, it just raised it.

Like, does it, can you hurt?

“Like, does it hurt the tree when you're moving sap?”

'Cause it seems kind of sensible. Like, it's not like it naturally exudes the sap. So if you're coming along as a person and removing it, like, is the tree like, "Hey, I need that."

And it seems to be not the case. - Yeah, that's good. I think I had that same question years ago about coal seams. If I'm not-- - Oh yeah.

- Yeah, I think I asked that on the show.

I was like, I always wondered if like,

just removing all of this stuff from the earth's core is like not a great thing. - I could see that. You're leaving holes in destabilizing it. It's gonna turn into some cheese eventually.

- You know what, you might have said that 15 years ago? - I probably did Swiss cheese. - But with, as far as the sap goes, removing it and harming the sugar maple that Dr. Jones from University of Vermont

who came up with the Jones Rule of 86, he did a study and estimated that something like four to nine percent of an eight to 10-inch diameter trees total carbohydrate reserves are removed during a sugaring season.

And that people don't tap trees that small. Like you said, 10 inches in diameter minimum. So the bigger trees probably have even more reserves and lose less of a percentage. So no, over a sugaring season,

you're probably not going to tap enough sap to actually harm the tree in any way. - That's great. But you did make one mistake. - I believe it's pronounced Dr. Jones.

- All right, yeah, it definitely stood out to me too, but what we heard is I thought of Sean Connery and not Harrison Ford. - Ow. - They just said it's wrong with me.

- Oh man. - That's a sign of something or other. I'm sure there's like a psychiatric test

picture of Harrison Ford says,

which one's Dr. Jones and you better pick Harrison Ford or else they're going to institutionalize you? - Yeah, or I mean, if you were to say Chia LaBoa if I would just walk into traffic after that. (laughing)

- They don't even want to diagnose that one, no. - So we should talk a little bit about how this stuff is processed. You know, like we mentioned sort of the home processors or if you're just a small-scale producer,

you're probably have that sugar house on your property. If you have a larger operation, you're probably collecting from nearby, but taking it to a central boiler location, like a larger sugar house, obviously.

- Mm-hmm. - And then inside that sugar house, you know, evaporation is a big part of it. You know, we talked about indigenous people and evaporating out all that water.

You still need to do the same thing. On a small scale, I know you mentioned like the propane heater, like the turkey fryer, kind of thing that you repurposed or wood fryer. But when you get larger, you know,

it's gonna be larger machines and they're gonna be a little, they're gonna have more bells and whistles on them. - Yeah, you repurposed the turkey fryer 'cause you didn't read online that you're not supposed to drop a frozen turkey

in a deep fryer, 'cause you almost caught your house on fire.

“So your partner said, no, you need to get that out into a sugar shack”

and make some syrup with it instead. - Yeah. - And by God, please do not fry your turkey indoors either. That all. - Oh, good Lord, who does that?

- I saw a video of a guy doing it, it's not good. - Was he running it off a generator that he had indoors as well? - No, no. - And it was a standard propane situation, but he did it like in his kitchen.

- Yeah, and we're gonna find a video anybody doing anything dumb these days. - One other thing, we're not gonna talk about him, but I urge you if you're like, I kind of like this, this sounds neat.

Look up evaporator pans. They're really cool. - Very cool. So something that I had no idea is actually kind of the fact of the podcast,

possibly, the flavor of maple syrup, the maple flavor itself. - It's not really present very much in the sap from what I understand. It's actually a result of the Mayard reaction,

the same thing that turns bread into toast. - Yeah. - Makes some duck delicious.

All, it does all sorts of amazing things.

And it's part of the, I think the caramelization process, it gives that sap its maple flavor. - Yeah, we have a pretty good detailed description of that in our toast episode,

“which I think was quite good, so go check that one out.”

- Yeah, well, and by the way, we want to mention, there's a new thing on Apple Podcast where if you mention something from like a past episode, that I think something will now pop up on your podcast player that tells you

where that episode is, which is kind of cool. - Yeah, I think it has a link that you can click. - Yeah. - Like Apple's done some just amazing stuff for their podcast app and player now.

And it's like, yeah, I mean, hats off to them for the design and thought that they put into it. So yeah, I say go check it out 'cause I think we have a whole channel there now. - So back to the process though,

after you have that boiling going on and get rid of that water, you're evaporating the water. You still are gonna have to filter that stuff out because something's in there called sugar sand,

who's like, you know, concentrated minerals and stuff, and it might, you know, make it look cloudy and this is stuff that you wanna either sell on the side of the road or sell on the store. And so you're gonna filter it from there.

And to me, this next thing was the fact of the podcast. - Oh, if you're a fan of wine, you know that terwar is the thing where a grape growing from a certain vine out of certain soil in a certain place on earth under certain climate conditions

will taste different than that same grape-grown elsewhere. And that's the same thing with maple trees. It has a terwar and if you are a highly sort of specialized maple syrup, producer or sugar, I guess. - Sugar, honey?

- Yeah. - Sugar, honey. - You can be well-known for your particular terwar and you can charge like a lot more money, I don't know about a lot more money,

but you can have like an elevated price because you have such a specialized terwar to your tree and syrup. - Right, you're like, my sugar maples are fertilized only with pig feces coming from pigs

that are fed 100% on a diet of organic truffles. - Yeah, maybe so. - You could get a lot of money for that syrup is what I understand. - I think so.

- So Canada is far in a way the largest exporter of maple syrup. They essentially supply the world with syrup. - Yeah.

“- I think they produce about back in 2023,”

Olivia found $457 million worth of maple syrup

Canada produced and sold. The US follows at 35 million that you use about 13 million, but Canada

which produces a ton of maple syrup

“still imports more than it exports or sells”

from Canada. - That's right, and that's just another reason that we need to stay good friends with Canada. - 'Cause they got the syrup. - That's right, and we're gonna be expressing that sentiment

on our summer tour all across Canada. The goodwill will be flowing. Hopefully, tap just like the maple syrup. - Yeah, it's the dove in the olive branch tour. - Quebec alone, we need to shop them out.

I know you mentioned there were the biggest producer. They produce about 70%, I'm sorry, 72% of the world supply of maple syrup.

55 million taps going and Quebec alone.

And they have what some people call a cartel in Canada. There's a government sort of industry group called the Quebec maple syrup producers or shortened with their French name, the PPAQ,

that basically acts as the go between

“between the 8,000 producers and the customers.”

And they're really in the business. It's not just like, yeah, we wanna make sure everything's going okay, eh. They tell you how to market it, how to sell it, what to do with the reserves,

like they're really, really involved. - Yeah, they're like the OPEC of maple syrup, essentially. They have a strategic reserve that they started in 2000 that can hold up to 10 million gallons. I saw them also described as a mafia

by an independent syrup producer in Quebec, because if you produce maple syrup in Quebec, it does not matter if you're a member of the PPAQ, you still have to give them a cut of your proceeds from the sale of maple syrup.

So like they set the prices, they can make the price artificially high, low depending on what they wanna do. And this is not to say like this is just all bad. They have done a lot of good

for maple syrup producers across Quebec, but they're apparently also extremely aggressive in enforcing their rules. - Yeah, I think that's the deal. Here in the United States,

if you wanna talk about the top producers, look no further than Vermont, very well known for their maple syrup, and New York State, is after that. And then, you know, other New England states,

but you also got to throw in oddly, maybe not oddly. Virginia was considering Ohio and Minnesota as other decent sized producers, but it's really the name of the game and the U.S. is Vermont. - Vermont, the old VT.

And I'd say we take a break, but first we cannot not mention the PPAQ's strategic reserves and not mention the great maple syrup priced of 2011 to 2012. - Yeah, take it away.

- Oh, okay, well, apparently, starting in 2011, a group of thieves slowly tapped off 2,700 tons of maple syrup from barrels inside one of the PPAQ's strategic warehouses. And nobody caught this for months because they either filled the barrels with water

or they left them empty, but either way, the barrels were in place. So anybody walking through the warehouse would not think anything was a miss, and it wasn't until an audit that it was found.

And I think out of 27, also, this whole thing was like,

13 million dollars worth of maple syrup that was stolen,

and they only got back 450 of the 2,700 tons. And even that, they were like, we got to destroy this because it's basically been through the ringer, no stolen and recovered and all that. And several people went to prison.

One of them, I think his name is Richard Valier's, he was sentenced to 7 years and 10 months for this heist.

“That's how serious Quebec takes its maple syrup.”

- All right, we'll take that second break, and we'll finish up right after this. (upbeat music) - Two percent, that is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

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(upbeat music) - All right, we're back, and let's talk about other parts of the world, because we mentioned York produces some maple syrup, and you know, it happens here and there.

They don't have like the big swings between day and night that you really need to cause the sap to run super well. So a lot of times they'll work with other trees. Birch trees can produce a sap.

Other kinds of maple trees I mentioned can produce sap. You're probably not gonna make that into maple syrup. You're probably using it for making like, like an additive, like making beer, making vinegar, maybe as something in a drink.

I know there's a pretty rich tradition in South Korea of their native maple tree, the Gorosotry, where they, I mean, this sounds dangerous to me. They get together in a hot room and drink like five gallons each of this stuff.

- Yeah, each. - That sounds like, I thought that amount of intake of liquid would kill you. - Well, essentially, it's supposed to do the opposite, that it's like a health tonic, essentially,

and then the sauna action, you're sweating out toxins and you're replacing it with this helpful sap. But I mean, if they've been doing it for this long, and people aren't keeling over, at the very least, it's not harmful.

- I just wonder how long that is, like over five gallons of time. - I don't know, five gallons of anything. - That's insane.

“- Like five gallons of water will kill you, aren't it?”

- Yeah, I think you can talk so far. - Wait, but yeah, they've been doing it for a long time. Northern China also drinks the sap of certain kinds of maple trees, but outside of Europe, there are places

in the United States, like the Pacific Northwest, where they're tapping big leaf maples. The thing is, you just need a lot more about twice as much actually to get a gallon of syrup, 'cause it's just not as sugary.

- Right, and here's the other thing too, that not only do they need a lot more to produce the syrup, but it doesn't have that same kind of climate consistency as far as freezing every night and getting warm the next day. So it's sort of between November and March,

it seems like, and maybe if you're someone out there doing this, you can correct me, but it seems like it's tap as available, sort of. - So you've got a bunch of syrup on your hand, do you follow it all of the processing tips that we gave you?

Time was that your maple syrup would be assigned a grade, one of three grades, fancy, A or B. Fancy was like the most delicate, B's the most robust, but people didn't understand that. They thought fancy was the best way.

- Yeah, it's like cats up, right? You think cats up is much better than ketchup, because it's fancy, that's not the case. So they changed it. Now it's all grade A, but then they assigned different categories

- That's right, they have golden amber, dark, and very dark,

“and that ranges respectively as delicate, rich, robust,”

and strong, the very dark, the strongest one, you're probably gonna be cooking with that, the lightest, that golden delicate one. Maybe putting it in a cocktail or something, like the stuff that you bought

the grocery store shelf or get ordered, I guess, to be delivered, to live on your home shelf forever. For your pancakes and muffles, that's gonna be that amber maple syrup. - Right, and then there's other stuff too,

like say you didn't get the sugar sand out and it's cloudy, or it has a slightly off taste, like maybe you sugar it a little too late in the season. That's graded, it's not in a grade and they don't sell it.

In the stores, instead, it's graded as maple syrup for processing. And so if you have like a maple taste in some industrially produced commercially available food, it's that kind of maple syrup. So if you ever had waffle crisp cereal in the 90s,

you were eating maple syrup for processing.

“- That's right, I did mention the refrigerator.”

If you don't open it, you can keep it on that shelf for about three years, but afterward, you apparently do need to refrigerate it and it can go for another three years.

It's at high sugar content, basically,

that's keeping it nice and pristine. But as happened to me, once you open that stuff, it can get little mold spores. - Yeah, I gotta go check mine 'cause I really don't think it's molded,

but let's say that you want something besides syrup. You're just so syrup, you drink five gallons of it and you want something other than the syrup. - What are you going to turn to, Chuck? - Well, I know everyone's seen those little maple leaf

shaped candies at a rest stop in New England, and I'm sure I'll ever can it, but yeah, they're usually shaped like little maple leaves, they heat that stuff up and pour it into molds to cool down. It can be like a softer light-colored thing,

depending on how hot you get it or that dark hard candy. And I've had those those were delicious. - Yeah, there's also maple cream, which is essentially whipped maple syrup. - Mo-baby.

- Yeah, and there's something called sugar on snow, which where you take a pack of snow pack together, which is why they call it a pack, and you pour boiling syrup onto it, and it immediately can geals

into like a caramel consistency,

and you basically eat it like a candy,

sometimes they put it on like a popsicle or a sucker stick. - Yeah, that sounds pretty good. We gotta mention to all our New England friends. I don't know if they have these in Canada, but the maple creamy is like a soft syrup ice cream.

And of course, at any local county fair, you're gonna get your maple cotton candy or a Quebec specialty, the delicious maple syrup pie. - I'm gonna try that one more in Montreal for sure. - Me too.

- I'm also gonna try to find some maple sugar. They're two, apparently when you bake with it, you can substitute, I've seen one for one, or three quarters for one, with white granulated sugar in your recipe.

And especially if you're making something fall-like, like a banana bread or apple pie or something like that, it apparently just steps up the flavor quite a bit. - Yeah, oh, and no last year, I mentioned my maple old-fashioned.

- Oh yeah. - Which is now my kind of go-to sweetener for my old-fashioned, it's really yummy.

“- Well, you should try some maple sugar in there, man.”

- Instead of the syrup? - No, I mean, you make the syrup with sugar, right? - Oh, no, I just put syrup in there. - But what do you make the syrup from, is what I'm saying? - From the bottle off the shelf at publics.

- Oh, I thought you made your own. We gave people like a whole recipe, didn't we? - No, no, no, no, that was a pumpkin spice. - Sure, yeah, you should use maple sugar in that, then. - Yeah, okay, good call.

But I use maple syrup right out of the bottle for my other favorite old-fashioned. - Very nice. - That publics, don't you, don't order it. - No, let's just go to the store, get that like a sucker. - So you mentioned that it actually has some nutritional value, right?

- Yeah. - So that it has 95% of your daily value of manganese. Like beat that. - Yeah, what does manganese do for you? Everything.

- 37% of your daily value of riboflavin, which is a B-Videum vitamin. Also has potassium, which is why I said, Videum, calcium, zinc, loads of antioxidants, apparently. And it has a lower glycemic index score than sugar by far.

So it spikes your blood sugar much less than sugar does. - Yeah, for sure. And they have evidence that some of the compounds from maple syrup can enhance the effectiveness of antibiotics.

- Yeah, and that's in that maple syrup, which means it's time for the listener mail.

from Kyle Metzger.

“Kyle says, "Hey, guys, I was recently listening”

"to the old episode from 2018 on the Concord."

Hey, we just mentioned another old episode. So that'll probably pop up on your little apple player, by the way. - Nice. - In my ongoing quest to simultaneous, so we listen to the back codologue as well as new episodes.

So Kyle, you are sandwiching my friend. That's the right way to do it, I think. - Nice. - Josh, you are continually amazed that the Concord fuel was carousine as that was very primitive or old school,

but actually almost all jet fuel was carousine and has been since its inception.

Basically, it's two uses are jet fuel

and household cooking and lighting fuel. I wanted to keep this in short and sweet guys. Love you too, and love the show. - Short and sweet, very appropriate for maple syrup, about the soda and chocolate.

- That's right. - That was "Who Metzger?" - Kyle. Hey, Kyle, thanks a lot for that, we appreciate it. No idea that carousine's been jet fuel forever.

So thanks for that.

“And if you want to be like Kyle and send us an email”

that I say thanks for that about,

you can send it off to [email protected]. (upbeat music) - Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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