How to Drink a Tree's Blood

Introduction

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Maple Syrup Podcast

1:34Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. 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, dear listeners. I want something maple, like right now. I do too. This was, uh, I don't know if this came from a listener or it came from many listeners or just my own brain,

2:05but we, um, not even thinking, I just, um, threw this one to Livia, uh, kind of forgetting that I don't want to give, I don't want to dox Livia, but let's just say she lives in the New England area. Uh-huh, sure. So she was like, oh yeah, baby, right up my alley. Let's do it. Yeah, I have the impression that she'll eat a thing of, uh, maple cotton candy if you hand it to her. Yeah, I could feel the joy coming through, uh, Livia'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

2:36as far as I can tell. And I think it was a good one. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, Livia also just as a little thing, remember we, we've said that she always has great, um, titles. And this one was How to Drink a Tree's Blood. Yeah, I think that's going to be the title. Oh, good. 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, uh,

3:06is there a movie called Sicko? Yeah, wasn't that, uh, didn't, wasn't that one a Harmony Kareen's movie or Kareen? I don't know. I think so. No, no, that was, uh, Michael Moore. Sorry. Michael Moore. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. About the American healthcare system and how broken it is. Yeah. So, Chuck, um, all right, so let's talk about maple syrup. We both want some maple syrup. This is fair warning to anyone listening. You're going to want something maple and that's okay. It's okay to want something maple

3:37even if you don't have it. That's right. Uh, but if we're going to start with maple syrup, we got to start with the maple tree. Um, 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, uh, and if you want the real gold standard industry-wide, you're going to tap into that sweet, sweet sugar maple, the Acer Saccharum, uh, because that's the one that has the real good stuff that has the highest concentration of sugar and its sap. And, uh, like you said, you might tap a red maple

4:08if that's all you got around, but you need a lot more of it to end up with what you want. So you really want, 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. Um, we're talking about, uh, North America, Northern North America, which includes the Northeastern U.S., Southeastern Canada. We're talking New Brunswick. We're talking Nova Scotia. Don't leave out Quebec because Southern Quebec is the, um, far and away the largest producer

4:39of maple syrup in the world. parts of Ontario and then Maine, all the way down in North Carolina, you can find sugar maples. There, um, are some places that sugar maples grow that they're not going to, they're not going to make maple syrup as much there because there's also, in addition 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

5:11throughout its lifetime. And I, 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, figured out a way to build a factory around a forest with trees going through it. Right. Um, yeah, as far as I know, no one's tried that. Well, I guess the biodome kind of counts. Yeah, probably so. Uh, 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, it was all new to me

5:42and I was kind of blown away. It was kind of a mind bomb, if you will, for me. Uh, the, the magic to the maple syrup obviously is that sap. And that sap has a, a very specific function in a tree. Uh, the sapwood is a part of the tree. It's also called a xylem. Uh, it's in that tree trunk just outside of the heartwood and it has tissue in that sapwood in the xylem that, that moves water and minerals around from the roots to the leaves. It's kind of like the, the freeway system, if you will. Yeah, or it's circulatory system.

6:12Hormones too. That's what sap is. It's minerals, water, hormones, all the stuff that the tree's moving to itself to help repair wounds and to, uh, 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 going to just be like this, that was useless and it kind of hurt. Um,

6:43there's a specific time when you want to tap a, uh, sugar maple to get the constituent maple sap. That's right. Uh, and that is in, in the major producing parts, which is what we described before, uh, that will be generally between like, uh, February and April with a peak in March. Uh-huh. And that is because, and this is the second sort of astounding part of this, uh, stuff, um, that xylem, that sapwood, it's, it's moving stuff all around, but it's also really good at holding energy reserves

7:14during times where it needs it. Right. So, there are these cells called re-parenchyma 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 a, this kind of, uh, positive pressure that builds up in the tree, um, because on nights where it's freezing and that,

7:44that turned into days that get above freezing, right, so when the icicles start to really drip, I've seen, um, the, the sap itself starts moving up and down and when it moves up, normally when there's leaves on the, on the tree, uh, transpiration or basically 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 maple

8:15at 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 going to come out and like you said, those, those starches have been converted to sugars as energy stores so that's also when the sap is going to be at its sweetest. There is a couple weeks that you can, you can tap a specific kind of tree in a specific location under specific climate conditions to get the sap you're going to need to make maple syrup and I mean, I just love maple syrup

8:46so much more than I did before. Yeah, for sure. It's, you know, once those conditions leave, that sap, 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 this is like a seasonal cycle like this is when the trees are beginning to bud again. you know, like we said, it peaks in March basically and if you, let's say you tapped a tree and you got a little bit of that good stuff and you put it

9:17on your tongue, it wouldn't taste like the final result. It's sweet, you can taste the sweetness but it's about, you know, the sap ranges from about 1% to 3% of that sweetness at that point. So like it needs to be processed after that point because what you really want to 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 was this maple syrup researcher from the turn of the last century

9:48named C.W. 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's found in the sap naturally 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.

10:18People have, you know, we're not the first persons to enjoy this stuff. Like 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, you know, who's the first person to eat an oyster? Like how did they figure out this tree sap was 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

10:48and there just happened to be a container below it that caught that sap and some indigenous person was like, oh, well, 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, 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 their finger because a woodpecker pecked a hole in a tree

11:18and 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 one, another suggestion is that somebody noticed a sapsicle 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

11:49with a higher concentration of sugar and if somebody broke that off and licked it, they'd be like, well, you need to get to the bottom of what's going on here because this is delish. I would love a real sapsicle. That'd be fun. We should also say this, so the Europeans who came over to colonize North America got this, like learned about maple syrup directly from the indigenous people who were here like the Abenaki, the Haudenosaunee, the Ojibwa, the Algonquin,

12:20all 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.

12:51The ones that I saw looked like little tiny rowboats which I bet you could use as rowboats after the sugaring 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

13:22hot 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, from that, I guess the sapsicle 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've just basically evaporated a bunch of water from the sap. So, there was probably different techniques that could also be combined too just to get it

13:52more 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 thickened state. You let it dry, then you break it up

14:23and you've got maple sugar on your hands. Specifically for one tribe, it was sort of a seasonal shift for the Ojibwe people. Like in the wintertime, 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, you know, store it as long as possible, hopefully all year long. And then, you know, did their other

14:53spring and summer stuff like, you know, plant and harvest and stuff like that. But sugaring season kind of kicked off 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 make maple syrup or maple sugar from, it's called the sugaring season. The place where you boil down the sap is called the sugar shack.

15:18The sugar bush? Yeah. The stand of trees of sugar maples together is called the sugar bush, kind of like a wooded area. Another name for that. Not the evergreen scrub bush that's found out in chaparral 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. Nice. That's right. I love it. The word sugar

15:49is a very pleasing sound to my ear, so I agree. 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. It almost makes me want to go do, like, basically move and buy, like, a little parcel of land that has some sugar maples on it and just make, like, a gallon once a year or something like that. Seems like a lot to do just for a gallon of maple syrup that I could probably buy from somebody else

16:19for much, 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, like, 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,

16:50a sugaring, I guess, supply house and they had, like, three, four hundred dollar evaporation pans that you basically put on, like, a propane gas, like, heater or burner and, yeah, you could do it wherever. But, yes, I think I would build a little sugaring shack or sugar shack just to, just to wood burn into a sign to hang over the door that said sugar shack. Yeah, and if some peyote happened to find its way in there, so be it. So be it.

17:22We 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-based 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 probably had a hunch about that as well. And don't forget the tiny rowboats that you could put in like a lake

17:52or a pond after sugar. That's right. Yeah. Let's take that break. All right. We'll be right back and talk more about maple right after this. Hey, everyone. Your outdoor space should feel like you. And Wayfair has the pieces that actually match the vibe of what you're going for. Yeah. Every style, every outdoor space,

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21:25So, Chuck,

Indigenous Influence

21:29I said that European colonizers got their just total awareness of maple sugaring or syruping 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. No longer did you have to put a heated rock in some sort of bowl with some sap

22:00and just wait. This just increased things tremendously. Yeah. I wonder if they collected in that or if they stuck to their baby boats. I hope baby boats. That's my wish. I think so, too.

Colonization Impact

22:15So, early on in that colonization process, you know, 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, an abolitionist cause. I think in the 18th century, abolitionists and Quakers were using like maple like as a way to say,

22:47hey, let's not, especially founding father Benjamin Rush, like, hey, let's not support these British slave-based plantations in the Caribbean that are, 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. And 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 the slave, slave-based plantation societies

23:19by doing that. Thomas Jefferson was like, I'm on board. Let's do this. Of course. Because it fit into his vision of the United States being a collective of Yauman 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

Abolitionist Cause

23:38that makes sugaring attractive is that it takes place in this weird in-between time when 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