Chefs describe the surprising side of maple syrup

When you think of maple syrup, you are much more likely to think of pancakes or waffles than smoked fish, but Michael Williams would like the opportunity to change that.

“Maple-smoked fish is very, very good,” Williams said. “A maple-smoked sturgeon would be mind-blowing.”

Williams, who operates Eden’s Table Farm in Dunbarton, a farm and market dedicated to high-end, locally produced foods, with his wife, Pastry Chef Addie Leader-Zavos, believes that American eaters have always looked at maple products too narrowly, particularly in New England.

“New England has always been a step behind, culinarily speaking,” he said. “I think it stems from the Puritans’ distrust of any kind of pleasure.”

Northern New England leads the nation in maple syrup production — according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA.gov), New Hampshire produced 149,000 gallons of syrup last year. (An impressive achievement, considering what a rough production year it was, although it pales in comparison to Vermont’s 3.1 million gallons.) But, until relatively recently, the region has taken a conservative approach to how maple has been used in food and drink.

In recent years, however, chefs and brewers in New England, and especially New Hampshire, have become more adventurous in their uses of syrup and have found a demand for them.

Dennis Molnar is the co-owner of Concord Craft Brewing in Concord. He said that in recent years maple-forward beers have become a regular part of his brewery’s seasonal rotation. This year he and his team have focused on Maple Bourbon Brown Ale, as opposed to last year’s Logger Lager.

“We kind of alternate,” Molnar said. “We did something a little bit different this year, but we also used maple. We [made] our brown ale and we aged it in maple bourbon barrels and added a little bit of maple syrup at the tail end to get just a touch of sweetness back into it.”

Molnar said that, compared to some other ingredients, maple syrup is fairly easy to work with. “We need to have it uncontaminated because any bacteria or wild yeast will change the character of the beer,” he said. But a simple heat-up of the syrup, or buying material that’s already pasteurized is the fix. The bourbon barrels that the beer is aged in come from a producer in Maine, he said. “Maple was already used in the bourbon,” he said, “[but it] doesn’t tend to impart much flavor to the barrel; we end up getting sort of the char and the burnt-y flavor, but it doesn’t change the alcohol content. There’s not sort of an alcohol shiver at the end or anything. So we get mostly bourbon [notes] from that, and then we add back a little bit of maple to sort of restore some of that sweetness.”

Sweetness, of course, is one of the primary characteristics of maple syrup, but Chef Keith Sarasin, chef/owner of The Farmer’s Dinner pop-up restaurant (thefarmersdinner.com) and of Aatma Curry House in Milford, says it’s maple’s musky, perfumy notes that make it such a versatile ingredient to pair with other strong flavors.

Maple Gastrique Recipe by Keith Sarasin
Ingredients
½ cup maple syrup (preferably Grade B or dark amber for deeper flavor)
½ cup apple cider vinegar (or balsamic for a richer gastrique)
1 Tablespoon shallots, finely minced (optional, for added depth)
½ teaspoon black pepper (optional, for mild spice)
½ teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon butter (optional, for a silky finish)

Instructions
Reduce the Vinegar:
In a small saucepan over medium heat, add the vinegar.
Let it simmer until reduced by about half (5-7 minutes), concentrating the acidity.

Add the Maple Syrup:
Stir in the maple syrup and bring the mixture to a gentle simmer.
Allow it to reduce for another 5-8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until it thickens slightly.
The consistency should be similar to a thin syrup—it will continue to thicken as it cools.

Season and Finish:
Stir in the salt and black pepper.
If using, whisk in the butter for a silkier texture.
Remove from heat and let it cool slightly.

Strain (optional):
If you used shallots, strain the gastrique through a fine-mesh sieve to achieve a smoother sauce.

“It’s funny,” Sarasin said. “At Curry House we use maple in two different dishes. We actually use it in our butter chicken, which is one of our secret ingredients. We use smoked maple syrup from Ben’s Sugar Shack. We add a little bit of that just as a quick touch, kind of our signature little special thing. Maple syrup works a lot like jaggery.” Jaggery, a raw sugar used in Indian cooking, has many similarities to maple syrup, he said.

“And since we study food from the subcontinent,” Sarasin continued, “we’ve learned that it’s a beautiful replacement for jaggery. Well, you know, jaggery’s got that little, that sourness to it, that kind of earthy quality.”

“That depends on where the jaggery comes from, too,” he said. “South Indian jaggery is a lot more like that. North Indian jaggery is floral, and so it reminded me of the different grades of maple syrup, like that dark amber kind of [syrup] mimics South Indian jaggery,” he said.

The theme of Sarasin’s pop-up restaurant The Farmer’s Dinner focuses on fine-dining applications of local and seasonal ingredients, so maple is prominent in many of his white-tablecloth dishes, he said.

“I think everyone thinks of maple syrup as this sweet dessert-based thing, but one of the things that we like to do is to use it in gastriques. A gastrique is basically a kind of a sauce or a glaze, with a soured, vinegar-like property. It’s like a reduction of a sauce. So I’ll do a maple gastrique with duck quite a bit because it works so darn well together. Anytime you have fat, you need to balance it with a high level of acidity.” And maple syrup helps round out that acidity, he said.

This is a use that Chef Chris Viauld of Greenleaf Restaurant in Milford puts maple to as well.

“I just did a maple-gochujang glazed duck breast for a dinner,” he wrote in an email. Gochujang is a traditional fermented salty chili paste from Korea. “And Emilee has a maple semifreddo on the current menu at Greenleaf and has done a maple creme brulee in menus past.”

Emilee is Viaud’s wife, Emilee Viaud, the pastry chef at his restaurants, and owner of Sweet Treats by Emilee (facebook.com/EmileesSweetTreats), a bespoke baking business. She said that maple syrup pairs well with the cream in a semifreddo. “It’s a frozen dessert,” she said. “It means semi-frozen. So really all it is is whipped cream and whipped cooked eggs and sugar. And then you can add really any flavoring to that, but I like adding maple because of the sweetness and how the richness of a dark maple complements that heavy cream.” She leans toward dark grades of maple syrup. “It’s got a more intense maple flavor. Yeah, and then really when you’re cooking with maple syrup, it is just so sweet. So you really want to try and find the balance, not make a dessert that ends up being overly sweet.”

Chef Viaud likes to pair maple with contrasting flavors. “One of the ingredients that I like to pair with maple is miso,” she said. Even though it’s a surprising combination, she said, “that’s actually probably my No. 1 thing I like to pair with maple. People always think of nuts, like a walnut or a pecan maple dessert, but with miso the fermentation and the saltiness really balances well with maple. If you just make a simple sugar cookie and want to put a maple glaze on it, you just add the miso. You can cook down miso to get it more flavorful — it’s very salty, where if you cook it down a little bit it actually gets more concentrated. You can add it to glazes. You can add it to fillings. It can go well in a caramel. You could also make a miso-maple ice cream.”

Miso Caramel by Emilee Viaud
“This is good to have on hand to add to ice cream or as a glaze to pies, cookies, and with coffee.”

Ingredients
1 cup pure NH maple syrup
2 Tablespoons room-temperature unsalted butter
1/2 teaspoon miso paste (add more for more salty taste)
1/3 cup room-temperature heavy cream

Instructions
Bring maple syrup in a medium-sized pot over medium heat to a boil. Simmer maple syrup until candy thermometer reaches 230°F.
Turn heat down to low, add room-temp butter and whisk until incorporated.
Add heavy cream and whisk until combined.
Add miso and whisk in.
Pour caramel through a fine mesh strainer and let cool at room temperature

Pastry Chef Addie Leader-Zavos of Eden’s Table Farm agrees that maple syrup’s sweetness makes it an obvious choice to use in sweet applications. She likes to use it in European dishes, where it is nontraditional and adds an unexpected complexity.

“I like to base caneles around it,” she said. “They’re a French custardy pastry made with beeswax. They aren’t very common here, but there was a war fought over them.”

The two other applications Leader-Zavos uses maple syrup for are a little more traditional. One is her Maple Sticky Buns.

“We also sell a Maple Nut Pie,” she said. “It’s like a pecan pie, but with walnuts.” Again, the earthy notes of dark maple pair well with the slightly bitter flavor of the walnuts, and the velvety texture of the syrup contrasts with the crunchiness of the nuts. “During the holidays,” she said, “I bake it as a hand pie.”

Emily Sliviak is the Marketing Manager for Ben’s Sugar Shack in Temple, one of the largest producers of maple syrup in New Hampshire. She said that while much of the maple syrup Ben’s sells is widely used in traditional ways she has seen it used more and more in recent years paired with savory dishes.

“We literally glaze all of our bacon, all of our sausage, all of that stuff with maple syrup,” Sliviak said. “So, as far as savory things go, salmon is great; we do an entree here with the maple glaze on it. And then we have rotisserie chickens here. We use a maple glaze and then we stuff the chicken with a bunch of fresh rosemary and it comes out really good. That’s one of my favorites.”

Maple’s affinity for smoke has become widely recognized in recent years by the grilling and barbecue communities. Steve Chase is the owner of Steve’s Original Sauces in Belmont. He said that while one of his sauces is spicy, with a maple background flavor, he wants to be very clear that he makes it with barbecuing in mind.

Crispy Maple Dijon Panko Crusted Salmon from Ben’s Sugar Shack
Serves 4.

4 salmon fillets, skin on
1 cup panko bread crumbs
¼ cup Ben’s Maple Sugar
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon garlic powder
½ teaspoon black pepper
⅓ cup butter, melted
⅓ cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons of Dijon or whole-grain mustard

Preheat oven to 400°F.
Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Place salmon fillets on the prepared baking sheet, skin side down.
Combine the mayonnaise and mustard in a small bowl. Combine the breadcrumbs, maple sugar, salt, garlic powder, black pepper, and melted butter in another bowl.
Spread the mayo/Dijon mixture evenly on the tops of the salmon. Gently press the bread crumb mixture onto the top of the fillets, fully coating each one.
Bake in a preheated oven for 12-15 minutes. The thickness of each fillet will determine cooking time, the crust should be golden brown and the salmon should flake easily with a fork.
Serve immediately with your favorite sides.

“I’ve been teaching people for years that I’m not a hot sauce guy,” he said emphatically. “Because people come and they say, oh, they look at the name, you know, ‘SOS,’ and they think it’s hot. So I kind of just, over the years, I said, ‘OK, let me come up with something for these folks.’ So I took my sugar shack maple sauce as my base. I took that into the kitchen and redid it a little bit to make it hot for them. It created a little smoky maple. And because it’s maple, I added a little bit of cinnamon to it as well to go with it. Cinnamon is a spice that has some heat to it as well. I just used a cayenne pepper powder as my heat in that, and it just developed into just a really beautiful, like little sweet maple with the cinnamon, and then the back end gives you that nice heat hit that people love to have, and it’s just turned into just a wonderful flavor sauce that people love.”

For Chase, maple is a natural pairing for smoky flavors, which makes it well-suited for barbecued meats.

“[My sauces] have a very subtle smoky maple flavor,” he said. “It’s not overly sweet; the maple just enhances what is in the bottle. Some people really love the smoke. If you’re not able to do any smoking, you can marinate your meat, your chicken, your pork, your beef — you can marinate it in this sugar shack maple and it will give it a nice smoky flavor.”

That sounds fine for a home cook, but what about professionals? Do competition barbecuers look at maple sauces as a cheap trick and avoid it, or is it something you might actually see at a high level of smoking?

Maple Glazed Ribs from Dan DeCourcey, owner of Up in Your Grill Food Truck (493-3191, upinyourgrill.com)

Maple Glaze
1 cup NH maple syrup
2 Tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 Tablespoon coarse salt
1 Tablespoon paprika
1 teaspoon granulated garlic
1 teaspoon granulated onion
½ Teaspoon of finely ground black pepper
½ Teaspoon of cayenne pepper (or more for extra kick)

Mix glaze ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium heat stirring frequently. Turn down heat to low and simmer for 5 minutes.
Smoke ribs as you normally would. If you wrap the ribs during the smoking process add a half cup of glaze to the wrap as a braising liquid.
Glaze unwrapped ribs during the last 20 minutes of your cook. Enjoy!

Jayna Todisco is the head cook of the championship barbecue team A Mazie Q. She is a World Barbecue Championship competitor and the Grand Champion of the Back to BAYsics (Ironman) BBQ Competition. She said maple is her go-to special ingredient.

“In a competition environment,” Todisco said, ”maple to me lends itself with so many benefits over other sweeteners, so I use it in my injections. I use it in my sauces. I use it as a finishing sauce. It does really well. I just, I can’t sing its praises too much because to me it’s probably the one finishing glaze on most of my meats. We compete majorly, and … of my four meats three have it. I have a world champion recipe because I did win a world championship on that one alone. And when people are asking, like, ‘What is that? What makes it so well? And I’m like, ‘It really is maple syrup. It really is. Like, that’s what it is. That’s all it is.’ I just literally take a paintbrush and I paint it with maple syrup and that is it.”

Todisco said maple often takes judges by surprise.

“No one is expecting it,” she said. “And when you put it on hot meat, the way it mixes with the juices, you really can’t identify it because during the cooking process somehow it executes such a different flavor than when it starts. You can still tell it’s maple if you’re looking for it, but for the most part everybody’s like, ‘What is that?’ Because when you do barbecue, people are looking for honey or brown sugar or something like that, but no one’s expecting maple. I love it.”

Ultimately, Michael Williams of Eden’s Table Farm said, the growing use of maple in different cuisines and applications is a reflection of a sea change in the way the public thinks about its food. “Slowly,” he said, “we’re moving toward an awareness of eating locally and being more aware of where our ingredients come from. Maple definitely has a part in that.”

Maple Margarita by John Fladd
2 ounces jalapeño-infused blanco tequila – I like Tanteo
1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
½ ounce dark maple syrup

Pour the tequila, lime juice and maple syrup over ice in a cocktail shaker. Seal the shaker and shake it vigorously until you hear the ice start to break up.
If you were to ask your digital assistant to play “Tequila” by The Champs, who could blame you?
Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass, and drink while considering that while the world is a messy and suboptimal place in many ways, there are compensations.
Many bartenders will limit their use of maple syrup to a Maple Old-Fashioned, because its sweetness often overwhelms other ingredients. Tequila has enormous strength of personality, however, and is not easily overwhelmed. Maple goes exceptionally well with acidic fruits, and lime juice, as has been observed on many occasions, is everybody’s friend. This cocktail is juicy-tasting, with a residual jalapeño heat. It goes down very easily. It’s something of a constant in life that one margarita can easily become two, then a party. This margarita could usher in a relaxing weekend, or perhaps a lost one.