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Bernice Chan

For most people, maple syrup is ideal for pouring over pancakes, waffles, French toast or oatmeal, but for many Canadians, it is a versatile condiment that can be used in both sweet and savoury dishes.
Maple syrup was first made by indigenous people in North America, and later adopted by settlers such as the ancestors of Pier-Alexis Soulière, one of the founding families of the municipality of Saint-Pierre-Baptiste in Quebec province. His family has been making the condiment for five generations and he remembers carefully watching as a child how his maternal grandfather did it.
“He was not a guy who spoke a lot, so my memories are of spending time with him – observing, smelling, feeling, communicating with the eyes and becoming hypersensitive to all the [things] that cannot be expressed through words,” recalls Soulière.

Since 2019, he has taken up the mantle of making maple syrup the traditional way in their small town that he says has one of the country’s highest concentrations of sugar maple trees, the only species of tree that can be used to make maple syrup in Canada.
In spring, maple water is collected by drilling a small hole in the tree and placing a metal dripper there to funnel the sap into a bucket.
“You need to collect the maple water every day – otherwise, there’s a risk of bacteria infecting the sugar, and then it creates a different flavour profile. We like to collect the water [while it’s] as fresh as possible,” explains Soulière.
Maple water is a colourless liquid akin to an energy drink: a mix of electrolytes, antioxidants, and minerals like potassium, calcium and zinc. It is 98 per cent water and only two per cent sugar, making it less sweet than coconut water.
Soulière says about 40 litres of maple water are needed for one litre of maple syrup that he sells under his brand, P-A Soulière Sélection. In addition to syrup, he makes maple sugar by reboiling the syrup and stirring it until it crystallises; while for maple butter, the syrup is boiled until it has a rich, smooth texture like Nutella.

Maple taffy is produced by boiling maple syrup without stirring it, then cooling it down very fast. “You’ll have the same texture as taffy, but it’s 100 per cent maple syrup,” Soulière explains. The hot taffy is poured in traditional fashion, in a line on fresh snow, with a wooden lollipop stick, then rolled along the line picking up the syrup together with the snow for a charmingly rustic sweet treat.
Last year, Quebec-born chef Jean-Christophe Poirier brought a taste of his home province to his daughter’s school in Vancouver by making maple taffy the traditional way.
“I did it for 80 students, and everybody was just amazed because people here in British Columbia have never experienced it before. They’ve seen it on TV, or they’ve seen it in books, but not experienced the whole thing,” he says.
Poirier has fond childhood memories of running through the maple tree grove in Quebec where his paternal grandfather collected maple water.
“Maple water is very light, but it has a flavour of its own – it really tastes of the tree. It’s not very sweet at that point. But you can see the floral note of the maple syrup coming up,” says Poirier, who owns the Michelin-starred St Lawrence restaurant in Vancouver.

Like Soulière, he remembers watching his grandfather boil the maple water over a wood fire as a child.
“I remember the different stages: when the maple water starts with a foam on top, and then you take that foam with a wooden spatula and you lick it – the taste of the wood and the maple. And that is reduced and becomes maple syrup.”
At St Lawrence, Poirier loves adding maple syrup to vinaigrettes and marinades for fish, meat and vegetables, then reducing it further to make maple sugar for desserts and sauces.
One of his dishes is a duck roulade with orange sauce that calls for maple syrup to balance the citrus’ acidity, and it’s also in an apple cider sauce that pairs perfectly with a juicy pork chop at his recently opened French-Canadian bistro Chez Céline.
“I use maple syrup all the time. It’s a staple in my cooking. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it.”
Meanwhile chef James Yang is careful about how he uses it at his steak house House of Dawn in Vancouver.

“Maple syrup is a very delicate syrup compared to others. Corn syrup or honey have a strong and powerful sweetness, but maple syrup has that nice, earthy, wood flavour from the maple tree,” he says.
As a result, Yang doesn’t use maple syrup as a marinade for meats, but as a glaze to finish them, like with char siu.
“We try to maintain [enough] flavour of the maple syrup on the protein so we can still taste its flavour profile,” he says. “We usually combine maple syrup with red wine vinegar, with a little bit of baking soda, and make it into a glaze so I can brush it onto my barbecue as the last step of the process, so I still have that nice intense flavour from the maple syrup itself.”
At House of Dawn he slices fresh cranberries in half and puts them in a vacuum sealer with some maple syrup. The machine breaks down the cranberry’s structure and infuses it with the syrup. Then he adds these cranberries to bison carpaccio to give it a touch of acidity and sweetness to balance the richness of the gamy meat.
Yang remembers being 11 when he tried maple syrup for the first time back in Zhengzhou, capital of China’s Henan province, when his father brought a bottle back from Canada.

He enjoyed the flavour so much that after migrating to Canada and training as a chef, Yang interned in a family-run maple syrup factory in Alberta to learn how it is processed.
He saw how as they make the syrup, they constantly check the sugar content to present the best flavour. “When you have a higher sugar content in the liquid, you cannot use the same processing time because it will be over-caramelised,” Yang says.
As for how Canadians like their syrup, Soulière says that typically, French Canadians eat it with a country loaf.
“Exactly like you would do with olive oil: you pour maple syrup in a bowl, and you just dip the bread. That’s the real traditional way, how my grandfather used to eat it,” he explains.
While producers often state that maple syrup will keep for about six months after the bottle is opened, Soulière says it is so saturated in sugar, it will keep for much longer.
“We recently opened a can of maple syrup that was made 25 years ago and it was still good,” he says. “It’s like honey – after a long time it will crystallise and then dry out, but it’s very rare that honey goes rotten. The same with maple syrup. Sugar is a natural preservative.”
Inevitably, for chef Poirier, maple syrup reminds him of home. “I think it’s one of the best sugars in the world. I like honey; it’s very impressive the way that it’s made. But maple syrup is on par with honey, and it’s a Canadian product, so I’m really proud of it – I use it all the time.”


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Dining

It goes famously well with pancakes, but in its home country it is the condiment of choice for all kinds of savoury as well as sweet dishes


It goes famously well with pancakes, but in its home country it is the condiment of choice for all kinds of savoury as well as sweet dishes.


Canada

Canada’s national condiment: the surprisingly versatile maple syrup

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}It goes famously well with pancakes, but in its home country it is the condiment of choice for all kinds of savoury as well as sweet dishes

It goes famously well with pancakes, but in its home country it is the condiment of choice for all kinds of savoury as well as sweet dishes