Most people associate maple syrup with snow-flanked sugar shacks in New England or Canada, sweet steam wafting from a wooden cupola, a cast iron wood stove blazing away inside. But here in New York City, a few steps from the West Shore Expressway on Staten Island, lies a small forest of red maple trees. At this time of year—on the cusp of winter and spring, when the daytime temperature rises above freezing and the nighttime temperature falls below—their sap starts to run. Each day, staff from the Interpretive Center at Clay Pit Ponds State Park Preserve head out into the forest, and, with the hum of the expressway just beyond the wooden fence, collect this sap to make the only maple syrup native to the five boroughs.
In contrast to the thousands of trees in commerical operations, connected by a maze of plastic tubing that carries the sap by the force of gravity to a central sugar shack, only forty red maple trees at a time are tapped on Staten Island, and the staff collects the sap by hand, rotating between three different locations each year on its 268-acre preserve. On “Maple Syrup Saturdays,” volunteers are only too eager to help out and experience the difference between Log Cabin brand and pure maple syrup made in their own city.
It takes a maple tree about forty years to reach the ten-inch diameter it needs to be ready for tapping. Some trees have more than one tap, also known as a spile. Essentially spouts, they are inserted into a two-inch hole drilled into the tree. The sap drips into a lidded metal bucket beneath it.
The staff empties the buckets each day to prevent mold from forming. They freeze the sap until they have enough enough to boil it, which takes about eight hours on a regular stovetop in the small kitchen the back of their nature center. No wood stoves here.
The clear sap is 97 percent water and 3 percent sugar; the resulting maple syrup is 66 pecent sugar. Forty gallons of raw sap boil down to just one gallon of maple syrup—hence all the steam issuing from the tops of sugar shacks. Sugar maples, the type of tree tapped by large producers, typically have sweeter sap, and so yield more syrup.
Clay Pit Ponds calls its product “Staten Island home-cooked maple syrup.”
From forty trees, Clay Pit Ponds makes only a few gallons of syrup a year, just enough for its own use at educational events and at one pancake breakfast held at the end of the tapping season.
The culmination of a Maple Syrup Saturday event is, of course, a tasting. The syrup typically gets darker as the season progresses. The staff hands out spoons and pours each visitor a quarter-sized drop.
The syrup unfurls languorously from the glass jug in a golden ribbon. I savor my portion, seeing if I can discern any flavor of New York, or at least of Staten Island. It tastes like vanilla, with a rich, woody, caramelly undertone, and a hint of a bitter bite that lingers at the back of the teeth. I notice that no one asks for more, content to enjoy the portion given, before tossing their spoon into a sap bucket with a plink. I peer inside and see a motley pile of spoons of all designs and vintages, each sticky with the remnants a small taste of New York.
Sense & the City is a monthly blog exploring the hidden corners of New York City. Each month’s post is devoted to one of the five senses. Receive daily sensory impressions via Instagram @senseandthecity.
