Beyond Maple Syrup: The Many Ways of Enjoying Maple
We all know how sweet it is to have maple syrup in our homes. From pancake breakfasts to meals with a tinge of sweetness, maple syrup has indeed become the sweetener with character. Unlike honey or sugar, this alternative sweetener has a distinct smoky, earthy taste that we so love. Fortunately, for those of us who cannot get enough of maple syrup, there are many different maple and maple-flavored products that we can delight in.
Maple syrup, as we all know, can be used directly from the bottle to add flavor to foods. Aside from this, pure Canadian maple syrup can also be cooked or process into many other food products that are just as sweet and scrumptious as the maple syrup that we get straight out of the grocer. Maple syrup can be processed into maple sugar, for one, or boiled and cooled to form maple candy. Another maple syrup-based product is maple fudge. These products are made when you condense maple syrup into different consistencies. Aside from this, there are also tons of recipes for making maple-flavored pastries, meals and what-nots.
The way we use maple butter has indeed greatly evolved since that time when the American Indians introduced maple syrup to us as a basic food and medicine for common ailments. Back then, they made maple syrup the traditional way—by piercing the bark of the sugar maple tree to collect the sap, and then condensing the sap to make the syrup. At the time, maple syrup was highly traded in the Americas, as it was a major sweetening product. The advent of cheaper sweeteners as time went on caused maple syrup to become an alternative sweetening product. In fact, these days, a mere one percent of the total production capacity for maple syrup is being utilized, which means the demand for maple syrup and other maple products is higher than the supply all year round.
