Mr McCutcheon's Maple Syrup.
Pictures from Ken McCutcheon's award winning maple syrup farm, Ontario, Canada. Christmas 2006.

For Christmas 2006, my mother took my sister Lucy and I, to stay with our great family friends, the Maize family. They live just over an hour North of Toronto in the province of Ontario.

I have been to their farm before, in 1993, 1998 and 1999; but what I did not realise is that Ontario is one of the few area's in the world that produce maple syrup. In fact only the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and some of the US New England states produce it. Apparently it would be possible to produce maple syrup wherever you have maple tree's, but Mr Mc Cutcheon has won the world prize for his syrup, twice.

One morning a few days after christmas, Jill called to find out if he was open for us to visit his farm. Fortunately he was and we piled into Jill's truck and drove to the farm.

The building where the sap is collected each spring season and then reduced from a 98% water solution, into a rich pure syrup or sugar at a slightly higher temperature; is little bigger than a swimming pool. I think I am correct in saying that Mr Mc Cutcheon's farm had approx 30km or tubing leading from the tree's into larger pipes and then back to the farm/factory house. He produces approx 1500 Gallons of Syrup per annum

The collecting season is very brief and everyone who works on the farm has to be ready to start the collecting, and very precise boiling process.

<The reduction pan> <Steam pipes to heat the sap and boil off the water>
<output thermometer> <Mr McCutcheon, Jill Maize, Mum>
Above: Steam pipes and control valves into the reduction pan, where the temperature is very concisely controlled, between 93c and 98c to boil off the sap water. Low temperature produces syrup, higher, maple sugar.


Also Above: A map showing all the places in the world where Mr McCutcheon's maple syrup has been taken to. My mum told him that I was going to Antarctica in February and said that I should take some there. Nobody else has yet taken maple syrup to Antarctica as far as I know, and certainly nobody has taken the world champions there. So I purchased a small bottle and am going to take it with me. I will take a photo of me eating it with something there, and post it to Mr Mc Cutcheon and post it up here.


Right: World champion 2005, silver plate.
Antarctica update (March 2007):

I took a bottle of Ken's maple syrup all the way to Bellingshausen research station on King George island. I carefully packed it in my suitcase on the just under 9,000 mile journey from London Heathrow, to Buenos Aires, then to Ushuaia, then on the boat across the roughest stretch of water in the world, the Drake passage. I was surprised and lucky that nobody tried to confiscate it from me at customs.

I then packed it in my race bag and boarded a zodiac inflatable boat to shore and changed into my running shoes for the race. I ran my marathon in 4 hours 31 minutes and managed to come in 12th out of 145 people; then warmed up after my race inside Bellingshausen, which the Russian scientists and base staff kindly let us use. I went outside and placed the small pot down on the mile marker and took a few photo's.

The church in the backdrop is a Russian Orthodox church, built in response to the pope declaring the Antarctic Catholic. I enjoyed the syrup the following day over pancakes on the RV Akademik Ioffe, and mailed Ken to let him know that he can place an Orange dot on the wall chart map over the island.


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Authors: Page and pictures created by: James Bartosik
Date of event: December 29th 2006.
Page History: First created: 10/01/07. Last Revision: 18/03/07. Revision version: 1.2.
Camera and Lenses: Canon 350D, EF-S 17-85mm IS, F4-5.6 USM.
Locations: Ontario, Canada.
Wikipedia links: Maple syrup.
Copyright: © Copyright material, all rights reserved.