1- Hi, it's Doug!
2Maple syrup. I grew up with it,
3but a few years ago, I traveled to Europe,
4and I was surprised to find out that a lot of people there have never tried it before.
5A few of the people I met who had tried it thought it tasted disgusting.
6What do you think of maple syrup?
7Well, someone named Wren is curious about syrup and has a question for us.
8Let's give her a call now.
9- Hi Doug.
10- Hi Wren!
11- I have a question for you.
12- How is syrup made?
13- Oo, that's a great question.
14There are so many interesting reasons why you might ask a question like this.
15Maybe you were sitting there having breakfast,
16and you realized you just have no idea where syrup even comes from.
17I mean, milk comes from a cow.
18Honey comes from bees.
19But syrup?
20Or, maybe you do know something about syrup, but just not much.
21Like, maybe you've heard it has something to do with trees,
22but how do they get it out of trees?
23Like, are there syrup trees?
24Could you stick a straw in a tree and start slurping up syrup?
25Well, syrup does come from trees,
26and if we're talking about the kind of syrup that's popular in North America,
27we're talking about maple syrup,
28syrup that comes from a certain family of trees, the maple tree family.
29You might know these.
30Maple trees are the ones that have those little helicopter seeds that look like this,
31and leaves that are shaped like this.
32So, how do we get maple syrup out of a maple tree?
33Well, sorry to say, you can't just stick a straw in a maple tree and just start slurping syrup out of one,
34although, wouldn't that be awesome if you could?
35But, believe it or not, the way we do get syrup out of a maple tree isn't actually that different from this.
36First, you create a small hole in the side of the maple tree,
37all the way into the bark, but not too deep, otherwise it could harm the tree.
38Then, you insert a hollow tube.
39A liquid will slowly start to ooze out.
40You see that right there?
41You wanna collect all that liquid in a bucket.
42Wait, so, that's it? That's how we get syrup?
43Well, no, not quite yet,
44because the stuff you collected inside that bucket,
45if you were to look at it and taste it, you'd see it's mostly water at this point,
46with just a tiny hint of sweetness, a tiny bit of sugar in it.
47This slightly sweet liquid you collected isn't syrup at all yet.
48It's what we call sap.
49Maybe you've heard of it.
50That brings us to the next important step in making syrup,
51taking that bucket of sap and boiling it.
52Now, why do you think we need to do that?
53Why do you think we need to boil the sap?
54Before I say anything more, it might be fun for you to pause the video and take a guess.
55Okay, you ready?
56You might've had different ideas.
57For example, sometimes we boil things in order to kill germs,
58and boiling sap would definitely do that,
59but it turns out that's not the main reason we do it.
60You can see here, when you boil something that contains water,
61you cause some of that water to rise up out of the container
62and leave the container as water vapor, or steam.
63But guess what, that little bit of sugar that was in the sap?
64It doesn't boil away.
65It stays inside the container.
66And so, as you boil sap,
67what you're doing is getting rid of some of that water that was in the sap,
68but leaving the sugar inside.
69The more water you boil away from the sap, the sweeter and sweeter it tastes.
70As you boil sap, the color of it starts to change as well,
71because the heat causes some of that sugar in the sap to turn brown,
72which is why maple syrup has that golden-brownish color
73even though sap itself looks clear.
74To make syrup, you don't wanna boil away all of the water from the sap.
75You still leave some of it behind so that it's still a liquid.
76But by the time you've boiled it down to being golden brown and kind of sticky,
77no longer runny like water,
78that's when you know it's ready. It's become syrup.
79In total, to make one gallon of maple syrup takes 40 gallons of sap.
80That's how much water you have to boil away.
81What if you kept boiling the sap, so that you boiled away all of the water?
82Then, if you look inside your container, you'd find a solid material left behind.
83That's the sugar that was inside the sap, called maple sugar.
84Some people do boil away all the water,
85and use maple sugar in order to make maple sugar candies.
86Although some of the maple syrup in the world comes from the northeastern United States,
87most of it comes from the eastern parts of Canada,
88a place so filled with maple trees that the country chose to put a maple leaf on their flag,
89and even named one of their hockey teams the Maple Leafs.
90But I wanna tell you, while making this video,
91as I got to thinking about maple syrup, I started to get curious, too.
92I wondered, how did anyone ever discover maple syrup in the first place?
93Who figured out that inside of maple trees is a clear liquid that can be boiled and turned to something sweet?
94I looked up more information in an encyclopedia,
95and I found out that the process of making maple syrup
96comes from some of the Native American peoples,
97or First Nations peoples, whose home is in northeastern North America.
98For many of them, making maple syrup is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years, maybe longer.
99No one knows for sure how it got started or which person figured it out,
100but one possibility is that a long time ago,
101someone might've been inspired by watching this bird.
102Do you recognize it?
103It's a type of woodpecker,
104but unlike most woodpeckers, which eat bugs,
105this bird pecks on trees for a different reason.
106It's a type of woodpecker called a sapsucker.
107Watch this.
108Sapsuckers carefully cut away the outer layer of bark on a tree
109in order to do this, drink the sap,
110the sugary water that's found underneath.
111And it's not just maple trees that they drink sap from.
112There's sap found in every tree.
113Some just have more than others.
114In fact, not just trees, but every plant contains some amount of water and sugar inside of it.
115So, it's possible to make other kinds of syrup,
116not just maple syrup,
117but maybe you've heard of some of these syrups too, like corn syrup
118made from the sugar water found in corn,
119or cane syrup, made from the sugar water found in sugarcane,
120agave syrup, made from agave plant,
121even syrup of violets, made from the sugary water found inside of violet flowers.
122So in summary, maple syrup is made by collecting the sap,
123or sugar water, found in maple trees, then boiling it.
124That's all for this week's question. Thanks, Wren, for asking it.