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Get sappy at Maple Daze at RTM
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Get sappy at Maple Daze at RTM
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| emericksmaple.com |
| Emerick's barn in Hyndman, PA |
Maple sugaring season is reaching its crescendo right now in Pennsylvania, which is one of the top five maple syrup producers in the United States. To celebrate the sweet treat, retailers at the Reading Terminal Market are featuring the ingredient at Maple Daze this Saturday, April 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Second-generation maple syrup producers Matthew and Stephanie Emerick will visit the Pennsylvania General Store to teach customers about the process of turning the sap of maple trees into syrup, cream, sugar and candy. Their maple syrup, produced in Hyndman, Somerset County, will be available at a 20 percent discount during Maple Daze.
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| Emerick's Maple, on Ebay |
Emerick's maple candy, with |
The festivities will be focused at the Center Court of the Market, where you can try such treats as:
- Cupcakes with maple-buttercream icing from Flying Monkey
- Down Home Diner's pulled pork with maple, made by owner Jack McDavid
- Bassett's maple ice cream
- Maple fudge, maple walnut fudge and maple-cream filled chocolates from the Pennsylvania General Store
- Stephanie Emerick's maple sugar candy, "the most teeth-shatteringly sweet substance known to man," according to Pennsylvania General Store owner Michael Holahan
Meal Ticket caught up with Holahan, who along with his wife Julie has owned the Pennsylvania General Store since 1987. Holahan invited Matthew's father Ed Emerick to visit the Market 1992 as a way to convince his doubtful customers that maple syrup was indeed made in Pennsylvania.
Holahan on the basics of syrup-making:
To produce maple syrup you need two things: maple trees and mountainous terrain.� Mountainous terrain is important because cool evenings and warm days are required.� You want the trees to still be pulling energy from ground during the cold night.... feeding itself at night and producing sap. Then as the temperature warms during the day the� sap runs.� When it gets too warm, the sap becomes bitter and you don't want to eat it.
After the jump, read Holahan's anecdote about introducing Emerick's Pennsylvania maple syrup to a suspicious public.
I actually started selling PA products in the RTM in 1987, and I had a maple syrup producer who stopped wholesaling.� I heard about this big maple fesival in Somerset County, PA, on the Maryland border.
I went to this festival in 1988 which was really great ... a big event in a very small town, a very rural part of the state. Ed Emerick won the blue ribbon and I figured I should buy the winner's maple syrup for the store... he was suspicious of me, this guy from Philly. He and his wife lived up in a mountainous area ... he said he had so few neighbors he could walk outside naked and not disturb anybody.
I started buying syrup from him, and people in the store would ask why was I selling maple syrup from Vermont in the Pennsylvania General Store. I'd show them it was from PA, and they'd say, we don't have maple syrup here. I had to figure out a way to convince people that syrup comes from PA, so I invited Ed out in 1992 to meet people.� We had a pancake eating contest ... the event continued for many years and Ed would always bring his young son Matthew.
We stopped doing it in part because we had a family and it became hard to pull off, and there was no space in the Market to do it. We were doing pancake breakfast for the firefighter's hepatitis C awareness fund, and eventually the maple thing became taken over by the firemen.
We decided to revive the event this year, and I called Ed up and sadly, his wife is dealing with cancer. But his son Matthew is married and has a baby now, so Matthew and his wife are coming out to teach everyone about maple syrup.
Matthew will be doing a thing his dad always did ... he pours heated maple syrup into this wooden trough on legs and works it back and forth and it converts into maple sugar. The syrup crystallizes into solid sugar, and it's very cool to watch.
So it's back to the future ... the next generation of Pennsylvania maple syrup makers selling in the Market.
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