It’s such a quaint idea, really, spending the first sunny days of spring in the sugar bush, tapping trees and listening to the “drip, drip” of the sap as it flows into buckets. Or so it seems, until you get down to the back-breaking business of emptying all those buckets (a sugar maple can yield up to 10 litres of sap a day) and lugging all that sweet water to the evaporation tank. As if you weren’t hot enough already, the stuff must be boiled for hours and hours: 40 litres of sap produce a mere litre of syrup.

There have been a few innovations over the past decades—plastic tubes eliminate the need for hauling buckets, reverse osmosis cuts down on boiling time—but it’s still gruelling work keeping up with the sap’s flow, a pastime for only the hardiest, most headstrong people. This may be one reason Gay Couillard still makes her own on her property north of Kingston. Sister to bad-boy chef Greg and queen mother to the boho shops of Queen West West (her bakery, Vienna Home, precedes them by two decades), she has always done things her own way, whether it’s baking cylindrical loaves in apple juice tins or opening her shop when it suits her (Wednesday to Saturday—for now). In bumper years, Couillard shares her labour of love in slender little bottles. Boiled over an open fire, the thin, sweet elixir takes on a slightly smoky taste—an obvious partner for French toast with a side of bacon.

Given the work involved, it’s no wonder maple syrup remains a boutique item. Maple sugar is even more precious, costing four times the white stuff. Nevertheless, demand for syrup has been growing steadily, both at home and abroad—in Canadian single-commodity exports, it’s second only to frozen french fries.

Maple syrup’s distinct flavour is both a blessing and a curse. Whereas white sugar is anonymous, the culinary equivalent of invisible ink (chefs actually have to burn it to give it some character), maple syrup lends telltale vanillic and caramel flavours to foods. It also contains all the original nutrients of the tree sap, from potassium and calcium to amino acids (refined sugar, by comparison, offers only empty calories).

Once upon a time, colonists evaporated sap into maple sugar as a cheap alternative to white, then a luxury item used sparingly in cooking. Back then, there was also a moral upside to cooking with our home and native sweetener: unlike cane sugar, maple wasn’t produced by slave labour. But in the 19th century, the price of cane sugar dropped precipitously. Now one of our cheapest ingredients, it’s in most of the processed foods we consume: in 2004, we ingested a staggering 26.1 kilograms each. By contrast, we ate a mere 0.1 kilograms of maple sugar.

Foreign to grocery stores, and only just starting to make a reappearance in gourmet shops, maple sugar has become a sweet spice in its own right. Chefs are learning to show maple’s characteristics to best advantage: as a flavouring agent. At Célestin, the restaurant and bakery that colonized an old bank at Mount Pleasant and Manor Road, chef-owner Pascal Ribreau brings in flavoured syrups and maple sugar from Chez l’Épicier in Montreal. Maple-rum syrup was an obvious choice for suckling pig; Ribreau sprinkles the sugar on fried ravioli stuffed with dates and white beans. “It adds a rounded, almost caramel flavour to the dessert,” he says.

Among syrups, some have a more pronounced taste than others. The Canadian system grades by colour. Number ones can be classified extra-light, light or medium. These are the thinnest, most delicate syrups, made from the first and sweetest sap of the season. They’re what most of us pour on pancakes. At the other end of the spectrum, number three is the dark horse of the syrup world, made from the last sap of the season. Because of its robust, almost molasses-like flavour, it’s what’s used in commercial baking.

“If made right, it’s not at all bitter,” says Jonathan Forbes, owner of Forbes Wild Foods, which supplies restaurants and gourmet shops around the city with foraged ingredients like cloudberries and spruce tips. (Like Couillard, he does things his own way.) He has been preaching the gospel of maple and other native ingredients for seven years now, steadily converting chefs to his single-source organic number three. Its intense taste adds heft to marinades, dressings and desserts. Forbes even prefers it as a rich topping for pancakes.

As for me, I’ll stick to number one for pancakes and French toast, and save the dark syrup for stirring into creams and custards. When it comes to maple syrup, a little goes a long way—unless you’re the one lugging the sap.

Where to Buy It
Le Comptoir de Célestin, 623 Mount Pleasant Rd., 416-544-1733
Forbes Wild Foods, www.wildfoods.ca