Maple Weekend

It’s Maple Weekend, when you can venture out to my neck of the woods and tour some sugar shacks, sample maple products, attend pancake breakfasts, and of course purchase all the maple products you want! We ventured out to three establishments. First stop was Kirsch’s Sugar House.

This was actually the first time that any of us had been inside a sugar shack, so we got to learn a bit about the process and sample both the raw sap and the finished product. Amanda and I were both surprised to learn that maple sap is essentially water with a very slight sweet taste to it. You take 40 gallons of that stuff and boil it down until it eventually yields you 1 gallon of syrup.

We sampled a variety of products, but the unique product at Kirsch’s is the Maple Mustard. Excellent as a dip for pretzels!

This area of Wyoming County is windmill country. Kirsch’s has 4 windmills on their property.

People who get excited about the windmills along the lake really should head out this way. There are dozens of windmills lining the hilltops.

Next, we went to Perl’s Maple Products. The nice people at Perl’s were giving out free pancakes (a plate of 3 per person!) as a way to sample their syrup. We picked up a bottle of dark amber syrup from here. They were also passing out samples of Yancey’s Fancy’s newest [and most appropriate] product – Maple cheese! They also had trees tapped out front so you could see the beginning of the process.

We then took a ride to Siler’s Sugar Shanty which offers a balcony overlooking their processing operation. They were also kind enough to answer some questions for us on making syrup yourself at home, which they said is certainly possible, although if you boil it down in your kitchen, you may strip off your wallpaper (boiling down sap into syrup generates a lot of steam).

Maple Weekend is a New York State wide function. For a list of participating locations, by county, visit the Maple Weekend Website.