chafing tray or stock pot

[wkies]

I had someone recently contact me who is interested in making syrup at home next season. They will be using a turkey fryer as a heat source and were thinking about a stainless stock pot to boil down the sap in. I have heard chafing trays work better because of the larger surface area and shorter side walls to prevent steam from rolling back in to the sap. Any thoughts?

[happy thoughts]

I use deep chafing trays on a concrete block arch where they work well. For a turkey fryer I'd think a stock pot would work best because the pot bottom better fits the flame size and shape and should give more even heating and a faster boil. A round pot will likely be more stable on a round burner as well. For a large rectangular steam tray I'd think you'd need a double or large oval shaped burner to get the most out of it. In cooking in general, I was always taught to match the pot to the size of the burner. A big pot on a small burner isn't a very efficient way to cook.

[Sunny Knoll Farm]

Started boiling last year with one turkey fryer with stock pot. Mid-season I had to expand and added another turkey fryer with chafing pan. I'm never boiling with a turkey fryer again BUT if I had to this is what I would do.

1. Cut down metal barrel or trash can to height of turkey fryer. ( This kepts the wind out and directs heat toward chafing pan..
2. Place chafing pan on fryer and cover gaps around pan so heat is kept on pan.
3. Find old big coffee pot and replace dispensing valve with copper tubing and valve to trickle sap into pan.
4. I preheated sap on my shop wood heater and filled coffee pot"preheater" with 180 degree sap. ( 3 gallon capacity ).

You need to run the pan shallow to get the best boil. With the trickle valve set right I could boil and check it every 20-30 minutes. I fell asleep watching TV once and almost burnt 10 hours of boiling!!!! Pretty scary how much you care about a gallon of boiled tree juice!

Nice way to learn and get maple fever. I'm upgrading from 25 taps to 250+ , 2 x 6 forced air and RO. Hope produce as much syrup in a couple of hours as all of last season!!!!

[Birddog]

I am certainly not an expert, however I used a two burner propane stove this past season and started with a small stock pot, graduated to a larger and wider stock pot and ended the season using 2 full size chafing pans, preheating in crock pots and my wife was thinking I lost my mind:-|. It is true that it boils best directly over where the flame contacts the pan but it boils out and away from that area of the flame and steam was rising from a larger area. I'm convinced that the chafing pans performed much better than the stock pots. Sunny Knoll Farm has some nice ideas that I wish I would have thought of.

[emo]

If you are using stock pots, Sunny Knoll has good suggestions; keeping the wind off of the pots will help with you boil. Some of the winds while boiling get cold and will cool of the pot. Using a block arch with chaffing/steam table pans has an advantage in that the lip of the pans rest on the block with the business part of the pan protected from the wind. I think most people use the six inch deep pans to help avoid boilng over. I use a 8oz ladel to move sap between the pans and I try to keep the sap just deeper than the ladel. I have a 20 gal. tank for bulk storage and use a spigot and copper tubing to fed the sap into the front pan. I found this helped with the boiling even without pre-heating the sap before it goes into the pan. With 3 full size chaffing pans, I can boil off 4-5 gal/hr if I really keep the fire fed. It is all trial and error, hopefully not too much error. Get ideas from this site and find what works for you. Good Luck!