let's go see what sort of eggs we've got today three down here and all these are
in good shape and now I've noticed that the Ducks have started to hide their
eggs down here yep you can see one right there maybe no all right so we got four
good eggs this morning nice work ladies
we even know we're a little ways away from Europe season and we've got a ton
of snow still on the ground I want to get ready for the season last year when
I tried to make maple syrup it was okay the setup that I did here at the farm
was basically just a propane burner with a stockpot on top because there's not
enough surface area for evaporation to make about a gallon of syrup it took all
day and two tanks of propane so let me tell you that was the most expensive
maple syrup I've ever had in my life this year I'm gonna try to do this a
little bit more efficiently and effectively I'm gonna show you guys
something that a friend of mine showed me about how to cook maple syrup on just
a bunch of cinder blocks everything that you're gonna see me build here you could
get for about 50 bucks so let's build the $50 maple syrup evaporator so step
number one is actually to prepare your area it doesn't have to be perfectly
level it doesn't have to be perfectly clear with snow but you don't want to
build this in the side of a snowbank so just make sure you clear out the snow
I've already done that here it was a good thing I've been thinking about this
project because right now this snow here is hard step two is getting your cinder
blocks I've had a bunch of cinder blocks stored down in our basement it was from
when we were doing the renovations and we were putting in some new footings and
so I'm gonna pull those old cinder blocks up and set them up right around
here
so now what I'm doing here is I'm basically stacking them up so the
pattern that I've found that works the best is with the flat side exposed make
the evaporator base that's going to be where the fire goes then you build up
the walls with the flat sides exposed on the other side and so there you have it
I mean it's not any more complicated than that let me just show you though
some features based on the number of blocks that I had handy I can carry two
trays in here I'm actually thinking I might actually
throw out another row of these just like this I might have to run to the building
supply store and get some more blocks to extend this out but here's the basic
design so you've got four blocks down in the middle that becomes your firebox
you've got these stacking up as your wall and you got these out here that act
as your chimney it's going to be important when you put these in to make
sure make sure that this is flush another important design feature is make
sure you've got a significant portion of the pan sitting on the block right here
and here you don't want it to be too precarious like this don't slip and
spill so you want to make sure that you really are just two cinder blocks with
wide here if you go any wider it won't hold pans like this you want to angle
your blocks just a little bit here this way it sort of pushes the smoke back the
reason the chimney is important is you know you don't want to get too much
smoke in your maple syrup if you do that you're gonna mess up the flavor just a
little bit like just a little bit of wood smoke I actually really like in my
maple syrup but you don't want it too much so you want to put a chimney in
here again because I'm a little bit short on blocks right now I'm gonna need
to build this up just a little bit more but all-in-all is pretty straightforward
so what you would do the way this works is you fill this up with SAP you fill
this up with SAP you cook them down till they get you know somewhat brown you
don't want it to cook down because what you're going to ultimately want to do is
bring this inside and cook it on your stovetop to get maple syrup exactly
right you want to eat exactly the right temperature and you don't want to
overcook it with a cooking setup like this you know it's a little bit crude
it's a little bit primitive and so getting the precise temperature is very
hard my recommendation would be that you pull this off when it's mostly cooked
down and you cook it on your stovetop and use a candy thermometer to make sure
that you get it exactly the right temp now a little bit of a fair warning with
this thing it's not permanent it's not built to last forever the cinder blocks
are gonna eventually crack from the heat you know it's just imperfect but what's
really nice about this is I can set it up for maple season and then when I'm
done I can just take these and store them in the barn somewhere toss them if
they've broken and you'd be ready to go next year I made a video a little while
back of my buddy Alfred in his maple cooker setup it's amazing
you should definitely go check it out he's a Mason it you made this really
cool brick arch and once it's up and going with good wood it'll it'll run at
between 1,300 and 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit now as we're gearing up for
maple syrup season here I'm gonna be sure to show you guys all about the
process and how we cook our own syrup here on the homestead we don't do it at
a massive scale we only have about five or six good tappable maple trees right
now around our farm that are easily accessible and so I don't do it at a
commercial level it's really just you know syrup for Allison and me over the
course of the year we actually don't use a lot of sugar
pretty much actually never use any sugar we pretty much only use honey and maple
syrup and so to cook this maple syrup right and have it set it's actually
important for us because it becomes a food source over the course of the year
like a real kind of cooking staple if you will can you pass the maple syrup
please it's spaghetti now it's way too early in the season to try to cook any
syrup right now there's no SAP running out of the trees but let's give this
puppy a go and test it out and I'll show you how the fire works and how you can
get the fire going here
one of my secrets to a good fire is using a cheap little fan and one of
those personal fans it's you roaring blaze really quickly so you ever had the
dollar store and you see one of these suckers
pick it up great for starting fires so once you get that fire going good what
you're gonna do is then take your pants just like this pop them right on top
just like this you always want to make sure they're stable remember that it's
like an important thing with these
that's how you make the $30.00 maple syrup evaporator it's just a bunch of
cinder block set a buck 50 a pop it takes about 20 of them to make one this
size if you want to spend a little bit more money you can make one even bigger
the pans you need to have or if you can find them on the cheap like I said I
found three of my pans for about 20 bucks and so I mean technically I guess
you could say this is a 50 dollar maple syrup evaporator but I'm going with 30
bucks because this is sort of the extra accessory I'm gonna be cooking maple
syrup real soon I mean I know the syrups not running yet but it's gonna start
happening any time now and so I'll be making videos about that be sure to
subscribe and you can follow along here at Gold Shaw Farm where we're trying to
make a farm in Vermont and eat some tasty tasty maple
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