Sugaring season in Vermont is a brief however candy window within the final licks of winter—or, should you’re a glass half full particular person, the earliest days of spring. The day by day temperatures are key for the gathering of maple sap: The nights should 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 tough work and requires a substantial amount of love for the game, as they are saying. Sleep schedules are thrown to the wind, different duties of much less rapid significance are saved for an additional 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 discuss meals, and dream up the belongings you’ll eat with the contemporary syrup. Or discuss concerning 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 possibly too-filling breakfast that makes nice use of the contemporary syrup and her sidekick, maple sugar. This sandwich is tailored 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” outdoors 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 strive. Maple is now not simply in your latte within the fall. Monitor down Picard’s e-book, and get experimental with it. In spite of everything, winter could lastly be over—boiling sap is without doubt one of the first indicators that we made it by means of.