How to Add Corn Syrup to Maple Sap to Increase the Yield

It takes 40 gallons of maple sap to produce a single gallon of syrup. Corn syrup can stretch your maple syrup yield.

Combining corn syrup with maple sap results in a greater volume of syrup, but the flavor will not be the same as syrup made only with maple sap. Corn syrup is a common stretcher used by commercial pancake syrup makers to reduce the cost of making their products. Maple sap contains 98 percent water, and bottlers must boil down 40 gallons of it to create 1 gallon of maple syrup, according to Time Magazine's "A Brief History of Maple Syrup." Adding corn syrup to the maple sap will also prevent crystallization in the resulting syrup for use in candymaking, according to the Cornell Maple Bulletin.

Things You'll Need

• Saucepan
• Wooden spoon
• Hygrometer or candy thermometer

Instructions

1. Bring the maple sap to a boil in a saucepan over medium heat.

2. Stir the sap as it boils and skim off any foam from the top of the pot.

3. Boil the sap until a hygrometer registers 66 percent sugar. Alternatively, boil the sap until it reaches 7 degrees Fahrenheit above the boiling point at your elevation.

4. Reduce the heat to low and keep stirring the mixture, which will crystallize or burn if you stop stirring.

5. Stir corn syrup into the simmering syrup until the desired amount of syrup is reached. The resulting syrup cannot be labeled as maple syrup, since you added corn syrup, but it can be used as an ice cream or pancake topping or in cooking to replace either corn syrup or maple syrup.

References

• Time Magazine Online: A Brief History of Maple Syrup
• Cornell University Department of Natural Resources: Confection Notebook - Old Maple Manual
• Cornell Universtiy College of Agriculture and Life Sciences: Maple Fact Sheets
• Backwoods Home: Making Maple Syrup
• University of Minnesota Extension: Maple Sugar Bush FAQs