Highland Sugarworks' Let's Make Pancakes kit chosen as finalist in National Association of the Specialty Food Trades prestigious annual award competition

Highland Sugarworks Introduces a Beautiful Let's Make Pancakes gift box

Highland Sugarworks' Judy MacIsaac speaks about Maple Sugaring at the International Association of Culinary Professional's annual conference

Sweet Ending to a Sticky Situation

Introducing Highland Sugarworks Pancake Pail

Highland Sugarworks goes Organic with Certified Organic Oatmeal pancake mix

Highland Sugarworks Introduces Organic Breakfast Gift Boxes

Just imagine how our Grade A would have rated!

Highland Sugarworks introduces a versatile Baking Mix.

Mr. Chris Pierson joins Highland Sugarworks, Inc.
as Vice-President of Sales

Highland Sugarworks creates
Cinnamon Maple Butter.

Seeking "Real" Maple Syrup Flavor

Original article by Maryellen Driscoll, published in Cook's Illustrated
March/April 1998, p.26-27*

Attracted by its dark, strong maple flavor, tasters pick a "lower grade"
syrup as their favorite.

At a friend's home in New Hampshire, I woke early one winter morning to find him whirring around the kitchen on roller blades. In between flipping
pancakes, he would eye the mercury of a candy thermometer clipped to a pot of simmering sap, the March drippings of two front yard maples. A few more degrees and we would have syrup, with the most pure and alive maple flavor I can ever remember tasting.

In our blind taste test of maple syrups, we discovered that tasters wanted a similar maple syrup experience. They wanted a syrup that tasted like the "real thing." Reflecting consumer trends, our tasters leaned toward the darker maple syrups that pack more of a maple punch.

Making the Grade
While all "real" maple syrups are pure, their characteristics and price vary
according to grade. In general, a syrup's grade is determined by the period during which it was made (the sugaring season lasts from February to early April).

Technically, the grades of maple syrup are measured by the amount of light that can pass through the syrup. Straight from the tree, maple sap is clear, consisting of about 98 percent water and 2 percent sugar. To make maple syrup, the water has to be boiled off to a concentration of 66 percent sugar. (This means boiling off about 39 gallons of water to get one gallonof syrup.)

Early in the season, maple syrups tend to be near-transparent because the sugar molecules in the boiled-down sap are able to reflect much light. As temperatures warm outside, wild yeasts in the sap begin feeding upon and breaking down the sugar. As a result light can be absorbed. So as the season progresses, the syrup darkens.

This breakdown of sugar also affects flavor. If maple sap is concentrated
without boiling (e.g., by freeze drying), the syrup will taste sweet but
otherwise have little flavor. The flavor we perceive as "mapl"² is actually
the result of chemical reactions that occur when the sap is boiled, says Dr. Thomas Potter, a food and flavor chemist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Department of Food Science. One of the two primary flavor notes is derived from the compounds that form when sugar molecules break down. The process is similar to caramelizing. This may explain why the darker syrups produced later in the season have more of the caramel notes distinct to maple syrup, says Potter. The second flavor note is vanilla, which is produced from compounds in the sap that the tree uses to make wood.

While vanilla and caramel are essential maple flavor elements, the full
flavor of maple is far more complex, says Potter. One producer's syrup can vary from a neighbor's because of differences in the soil, the tree
chemistry, or the method of heating the sap.

The season's earliest sap flow produces Grade A light, or "Fancy" as it is
called in Vermont. Honey gold and near-transparent, it has a pronounced
sweetness and a delicate vanilla flavor. Grade A light can be the most
expensive syrup and is not typically found in supermarkets. While it takes no more energy to produce than the other grades, its higher price was established more than 100 years ago, when "sugaring" was about just that - turning maple syrup into sugar. The lighter syrup made a finer sugar, so it sold at a higher cost, which simply never changed, says Sumner Williams, assistant director at the University of Vermont's Proctor Maple Research Center. Today Grade A light syrups are primarily used to make maple sugar candies.

The season's second syrup is Grade A medium amber. This has a warmer, caramel color with a medium-strength flavor. It is generally touted as the syrup for pancakes. Right on the heels of medium amber is Grade A dark amber, which is slightly deeper in color and has a more pronounced flavor.

After the ambers falls Grade B, the darkest and typically least expensive of the syrups on the market. It is traditionally considered cooking grade
because of its strength of flavor. Only Vermont makes Grade B syrup for
consumer table use. Other states make a similar syrup but only sell it in
bulk to the food industry because it is deemed too strong and too dark. Some whole foods stores carry it in bulk.

Lastly, there is a Grade C, characterized by strong, almost molasses-like
flavor. Sold only to the food industry, Grade C is used in table syrups.

Going for Gusto
Of the nine samples in the tasting, tasters decided that if they had the
choice, they would reach for the Vermont "B" syrup in the tasting to drizzle on their pancakes. Most tasters were won over by the depth of flavor and the dark rum color of the syrup. Many wrote comments such as "tastes real." And unlike many of the syrups, which lost their distinction when poured on a waffle, this one's bold characteristics held up.

The close runner-up in our tasting was a Grade A dark amber by Spring Tree. Overall, tasters preferred the dark amber syrups to the medium ambers.
According to Lynn Reynolds, whose Wisconsin family business, Reynolds Sugarbush Inc., is one of the country¹s largest and oldest maple syrup operations (established in 1630), the demand for dark amber has recently begun to exceed the demand for medium amber nationwide.

Likewise, the Grade A medium amber syrups in our tasting failed to spark tasters' interest, apparently because they were not bold enough. Not surprisingly, then, tasters flat-out rejected the one "Fancy" grade syrup we included in the tasting.

We purchased William-Sonoma¹s Grade A Medium Amber syrup, which sells for $16 in a one-quart ceramic jug, but excluded it from the chart because the syrup seemed spoiled. Another jug purchased separately also tasted fermented. Two experts said that ceramic, being porous, may have caused this syrup to spoil from exposure to oxygen.

None of our results indicated syrup made from one region or state is
superior to another, and industry experts agreed that it is difficult, if
not impossible, to determine by taste where a syrup is made. We also could not conclude that one grade of maple syrup is superior to another. Our winner was a Grade B, but it was the only Grade B in the tasting because it is not typically carried in mainstream shopping outlets. (We purchased ours through a mail-order food catalog.) We would suggest, then, that when purchasing a syrup, consider the strength of flavor and choose the best-ranking product in the above chart accordingly.

March, 1998