Sugaring season in Vermont is a brief however candy window within the final licks of winter—or, if you happen to’re a glass half full particular person, the earliest days of spring. The every day temperatures are key for the gathering of maple sap: The nights have to be chilly sufficient to freeze and the times heat sufficient for the sap to run freely.
I’m fortunate sufficient to be married to a born-and-raised Vermonter, the place visits to our good friend’s sugar shack on the Bunker Farm in Putney, Vermont throughout these valuable sugaring weeks are a spotlight. The work of sugaring, like all issues on a farm, is difficult work and requires an excessive amount of love for the game, as they are saying. Sleep schedules are thrown to the wind, different duties of much less quick significance are saved for one more day, as a result of as soon as the sap is operating, it’s boiling time. For the hours spent standing close to the evaporator in a maple-scented steam cloud, it is onerous to not speak meals, and dream up the stuff you’ll eat with the recent syrup. Or speak in regards to the nice meals you’ve concocted with the syrup (or simply drink some heat syrup instantly from the evaporator).
Enter the maple fried egg. After all of the onerous work and lack of sleep, what higher approach to rejoice sugaring season than with a deeply and perhaps too-filling breakfast that makes nice use of the recent syrup and her sidekick, maple sugar. This sandwich is customized from a recipe in Martin Picard’s fully genius and maple-centric e book, Au Pied de Cochon: Sugar Shack, primarily based upon the meals served at his “cabane à sucre” exterior of Montreal. I’ve simplified the recipe in locations, however the root of it stays the identical: the syrup. If the concept of frying an egg in darkish candy liquid turns you off, I’ll recommend you set your prejudices apart and provides it a attempt. Maple is now not simply to your latte within the fall. Monitor down Picard’s e book, and get experimental with it. In any case, winter could lastly be over—boiling sap is without doubt one of the first indicators that we made it via.
