Hungry for pancakes and real syrup? Check Out the Maple Harvest Festival
For many in Happy Valley, Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center’s Maple Harvest Festival marks the real start of spring. This annual celebration of sap rising, which takes place this weekend, will once again herald the start of longer, warmer days.
The main attraction is the all-you-can-eat pancakes—well, actually, their syrup, but what’s one without the other? Over two days about 10,000 pancakes are consumed, estimates Laurie McLaughlin, the festival organizer. For an additional fee, you can add local organic sausage to your plate; it tastes just as good as the pancakes when doused with Pennsylvania maple syrup. The Penn State Sustainability Club provides the sausage, which is from Brenneman’s in Huntington, while the syrup comes from Wagner’s Maple Sugar Camp southeast of Pittsburgh.
That’s right, the syrup does not come from Shaver’s Creek. And why not? Shaver’s Creek serves 20 to 25 gallons of syrup during the festival. One gallon of syrup is made from 43 gallons of sap and each tree produces just 10 gallons of sap. Translation: that’s a lot of trees.
Instead, the approximately 45 trees tapped at Shavers Creek, which have produced about 2 quarts of syrup so far this year, are used for demonstration. You can watch that sap transform into syrup at the evaporator in operation during the festival, then test your syrup palate with a blind taste test that pits the local stuff against name brands.
The festival fits nicely into a culture that encourages consumers to get closer to the source of their food. And syrup, its turn out, has a rich narrative, from its use in colonial America as a substitute for hard-to-find sugar to the multi-generational history of Pennsylvania sugar bushes that are still maintained today. In fact, maple sugaring still plays a notable role in the agricultural economy of Pennsylvania. In 2009, 92,000 gallons of maple syrup were produced in Pennsylvania, which comprises 4 percent of all maple syrup produced in the United States, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Festival demonstrations highlight syrup’s vital role in agriculture, showing how Native Americans used hollowed logs to hold the sap or the proper way to tap a tree so that its health is maintained. “Hopefully people will realize it’s a little more than just consuming something sweet,” says Instructor and Program Director Eric Burkhart. “It’s the link of culture and history and resource management and trying to get people to appreciate the world around them.”
That message extends to the interns who are so integral to planning the event. From history to biology–energy stored in the roots in fall is now coursing up the tree as sap to help create new leaves –syrup is a complex subject. And, as Burkhart points out, utterly foreign to many. “They’re used to Aunt Jemima out of the bottle.”
If you want a taste of real syrup, head out to Shavers Creek this Saturday or Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. It’s $8 for the festival and all-you-can-eat pancakes ($4 for members), plus $2 for that well-worth-it sausage.
Jennie Daley, a former reporter, works in admissions at Penn State.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 9:53 am and is filed under Events, Food, Guest Blogger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
