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A Sweet Excursion

Category: Uncategorised

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Written by Thom Ring

For years now my wife Jan and I have had a tradition of heading out to western Massachusetts in early spring for breakfast. It started when her daughter Ruby - now searching for herself out in southern California somewhere - was just a little kid. Since then we've repeated the trip with various family-members and their friends tagging along. It always makes for a relaxing and enjoyable day.

Okay, so it isn't breakfast we're after. What got us driving two hours was an article in a Boston paper about sugaring-time in the Bay State. I had an idea of the lore of maple-sugaring, but I had no idea that sugaring was practiced in southern New England. And since this winter/spring tradition combined three of my favorite things, namely maple syrup, western Mass., and breakfast, I figured this was worth a day's driving, eating and browsing.

We haven't missed a year since. While over the years we've eaten and browsed at different combinations of sugar houses and gift shops, in the last decade or so our trip has always revolved around breakfast at the Red Bucket sugarhouse in Worthington. Brunch actually is a more accurate term. Yes, they serve pancakes and french toast with decanters of warm maple syrup on the table, as well as bacon, sausage, coffee and the other staples that make breakfast complete. But this is about maple. They also serve maple chai tea, a favorite of Jan's and Ruby's. You can have some maple ice cream, in a bowl or wrapped with a crepe covered in whipped cream, plus a little syrup drizzled over the combination. Sprinkle some maple sugar over the confection if you're into overkill. Or have a maple-frosted doughnut. Or hit the gift shop and grab some maple candy or maple cotton candy or perhaps maple kettle-corn.

We grab the syrup - by the gallon. This year we left with four half-gallon jugs of the Red Bucket's "A" grade syrup and two jugs of its "B" grade, a darker, richer and yet slightly less sweet version that is my default choice for any cooking calling for a sweet touch. We're not totally mad, we just want to make sure we don't need syrup until our next visit.

Jeff Mason, the co-owner of the Red Bucket with his wife LeAnn, explains why local syrup is worth stocking up on.

"The supermarket stuff is a blend," he explains. "They'll combine good syrup with cheaper grades to make their syrup as cheaply as they can."

Those cheaper grades might not even be marketable if not disguised in a blend.

"There can be 'muddiness,'" says Mason, "or off-flavors."

And please, that "pancake syrup" you buy with the log cabin on the bottle, let's not even think about ruining perfectly good pancakes with it.

"They can use the work 'maple' if they have as little as two percent maple syrup in it," Mason points out. And with so little real maple syrup in their concoction, "They don't care what it is."

The Red Bucket sugarhouse might not be a log cabin, but a visit there is an immersion into precisely the experience the pancake syrup's bottle is obnoxiously suggesting. The word "quaint" hardly serves to describe the scene. You step through the door onto a peastone floor and face a giant open tank from which steam is pouring as the maple sap it contains is reduced to syrup over a wood fire. To your right is a sliding door cobbled from plexiglass and furring-strips  by Jeff's own hands. The dining room is built of raw wood and overlooks acres of maple trees that you can view through a plexiglass wall as you eat. One table is built around a perpetually-tapped maple tree with - what else - a red bucket attached, sap dripping slowly into it.

But quaint is not a term to describe the process of sugaring in the 21st century. Rather than individual buckets, Mason's trees are strung with miles of plastic hose, gravity feeding strategically-placed collection tanks. Mason scoots around the property on an industrial-strength quad, and tractors transport the collected sap, which first is subjected to the process of "reverse osmosis" (a sort of forced filtering to remove water) before boiling begins.

All this mechanization is necessary if Mason is to get the most out of his crop of trees in the short mapling season, which pretty much is defined as when days and nights straddle either side of freezing. But Mason is an expert at the task and earns most of his income designing and installing systems that help others as far west as Wisconsin do the same.

Yet technology or no, this is a mom-n-pop operation or, to be more precise, a grandmom-n-grandpop operation. Mason ticks off the names of family members who help run the place during sugaring time.

"There's my father in-law Al Parsons (boiling the sap down). My daughter Melissa and son in-law Bruce do the cooking. My granddaughter Jessica and my wife wait on tables. My daughter Stacy helps out.

"Oh, and Al's wife Leona is in the store."

They all put in long days in the six weeks the sap is running. For the rest of the year I just keep hoping we don't run out.

The Red Bucket Sugar Shack is off Mass., Rte 112, at 584 Kinne Brook Rd. Restaurant open weekends mid-February to mid-April. Maple products and gift packs are available year-round.