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Sugarsnow
04-28-2018, 08:38 AM
This season we made some maple sugar, mainly for use in coffee. This week I discovered that it has developed what looks like fine white mold. Also some liquid syrup is settling in the bottom of the jar. I thought that maple sugar was shelf stable, apparently I am mistaken, or some other problem has occurred.

How should it be stored?
Can I somehow save what had gone bad?

Thanks!

Bricklayer
04-28-2018, 09:40 AM
This is the first year I made large amounts of sugar. I made them in 1 gallon batches.
Couple things I noticed is that after hot sifting the sugar and letting it sit for an hour or 2 to cool off if it has any moisture left in it it will harden up a bit. Only happened to me once. If this happens I spread it on a cookie sheet on parchment paper and put in oven at lowest possible setting on oven I think 150F for 10-15 minutes. Then hot sift again.
And it's good to go. When it's done if you make a pile of it and it kinda slides down the edges then it's good. If it just sits there it's to moist. There is a word for this kinda testing but I have no idea what it's called. I just use if it stiffens up when cool it's got too much moisture in it.
Im just guessing. But the white spots you are getting might be from too much moisture left in the sugar. Or it's sugar bonding to nitre if there is any left in the syrup.
For packaging the bulk of sugar I had this year I used a food saver vacuum packer and did 2kg packages (5lbs).

Sugarsnow
04-28-2018, 10:06 AM
So I used the wrong term for what we made, it’s maple sugar candy. We poured it on a sheet pan so it was about 1/4 inch thick and let it harden. Then broke it in to chunks. Also did some with the maple leaf shaped molds.

Bricklayer
04-28-2018, 10:22 AM
Can't help with candy, I've only made it a couple times and it never lasted more then a week before it was all consumed. So no time to actually store it. But I do know that shelf life of sugar candy is not more then a couple weeks. Unless it's crystal coated. Here's a good article on it.

http://www.nnyagdev.org/maplefactsheets/CMB%20208%20Molded%20Sugar%20Candy.pdf

Father & Son
04-29-2018, 10:49 PM
Bricklayer,
The word you're looking for is "creep". That's the slow movement maple sugar makes when poured in a mound at the proper moisture content.

Jim