Tapping into Spring

While many eyes focus on the NCAA basketball tournament in March, there is another kind of "March Madness" taking place. Below-freezing nights and sunny, warm days provide optimal conditions for sugar maple sap to start moving, possibly draining into a bucket or through a network of tubes to a sugarhouse, where it is evaporated over roaring fires and transformed into a regional delicacy sought round the world—maple syrup.

The sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is the most common maple species in New York and provides the brilliant red leaves of autumn. In early spring, the trees further stimulate our senses with maple syrup derived from their sap. This leaves little wonder why the sugar maple is New York's official state tree and appears in the center of the Canadian flag.

As the daytime temperature begins to rise, starch accumulated during the previous summer and stored over the winter in the tree's xylem parenchyma is hydrolyzed by special "contact cells." Hydrolyzed starch products include the sugar—sucrose—which can reach concentrations of 3-5 percent. Each tree functions as a primed osmotic pump, with its high concentration of sugars dissolved in the maple tree's large plumbing network of phloem. It takes about 42 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup. Cornell University and the Cornell Cooperative Extension have an outstanding Web site http://www.dnr.cornell.edu/ext/maple/ that is dedicated to New York's maple forests and maple-syrup producers. This site also provides access to material on the history, science and art of maple-syrup production.

With high-quality syrup predicted this season, it is prime time to watch the maple-sugaring process in person. You can visit any number of maple-syrup operations in the Niagara region by pointing your browser to "Round the Bend's" maple sugaring Web site at http://www.roundthebend.com/niagara
/niagsugr.html. You can take a longer country ride to the Chautauqua/Allegheny region http://www.roundthebend.com/chautauq/ or to New York's Finger Lakes region http://www.roundthebend.com/finger/. Many of these facilities provide live demonstrations showing maple-sugaring techniques from the early Native Americans and 18th-century pioneers to the present-day sugarhouse. Hopefully, your motor trip will be capped off with buttermilk pancakes hot off the griddle and laden with 100 percent fresh New York maple syrup.

Yes, you will be able to buy maple syrup to take back home. Test your tasty treat in any one of the scores of recipes provided by the folks at Cornell at http://www.dnr.cornell.edu/ext/maple/Maple%20Tour/Recipes/recipes.htm.

The Science and Engineering Library maintains a Web site, "Tapping into Spring: The Science of Maple Sugaring" http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/sel/bio/maple.html for more details on maple sugaring.

—Fred Stoss, University Libraries