After having spent the night in a Motel in New Hampshire, I crossed the border en route to Burlington. As short drive into Vermont I encountered Maple Grove Farms factory and for a dollar you can do a guided tour.

Maple Grove Farm originates from 1915 and began as a cottage industry by two local women, Helen Gray and Ethel McLaren, who made maple candy using pure maple syrup and cream that were produced on their farm. Today, we have grown into one of the largest packers of pure maple syrup and a top specialty salad dressing brand in the US. And they still make and hand pack the maple candies (below).

I was actually expecting to see the processing of maple sap into maple syrup, but apparantly the syrup is being produced at the maple farms in the area (vermont, canada, etc). What I did not know was that harvesting the maple sap is a purely seasonal bussiness. As the maple tree begins its new growth each spring, the sap which stays frozen during winter, begins to thaw. Once the sap starts to flow within the trunk of the tree, usually in February or March, the owner of the “sugarbush” (grove of sugar maple trees) can capture the sap.

After the sap is collected, it is boiled in a sugarhouse. Sap is highly perishable and must be boiled at once to make fine syrup. The sap is heated in an “evaporator”, which causes large amounts of water to be driven off as steam, leaving syrup. Most evaporators consist of a long firebox (known as the arch) for a wood fire or an oil burner underneath and have shallow, partitioned pans above the heat.

It is this boiling process that produces the great maple flavor. Just the right amount of cooking time is crucial! Too much cooking will cause the sugars to start to caramelize, the syrup will darken and a lower-grade syrup is produced; or even worse, it can boil over and scorch, ruining the entire batch!

Maple syrup is graded into 3 categories and grade A is the best syrup. Biochemically, real maple syrup is mostly sucrose, with a small portion of glucose and fructose. A tablespoon of maple syrup contains 50 calories, 29 grams of carbohydrates, a negligible amount of sodium and no protein, fat, or cholesterol.

Outside the maple factory I had a chat with a fiddler who regularly visited Belgium. He advised me to drive around on the dirt roads as there was a lot of nice scenery to see. And he gave me some ideas of what to see and do in Vermont.

I stayed for the night in Berlin, which is just outside Montpelier, the small capital of Vermont.