A Maple-Fried Egg Is the Greatest Approach to Welcome Spring

Sugaring season in Vermont is a brief however candy window within the final licks of winter—or, if you happen to’re a glass half full individual, the earliest days of spring. The every day temperatures are key for the gathering of maple sap: The nights should be chilly sufficient to freeze and the times heat sufficient for the sap to run freely.

I’m fortunate sufficient to be married to a born-and-raised Vermonter, the place visits to our buddy’s sugar shack on the Bunker Farm in Putney, Vermont throughout these valuable sugaring weeks are a spotlight. The work of sugaring, like all issues on a farm, is tough work and requires quite a lot of love for the game, as they are saying. Sleep schedules are thrown to the wind, different duties of much less instant significance are saved for an additional day, as a result of as soon as the sap is operating, it’s boiling time. For the hours spent standing close to the evaporator in a maple-scented steam cloud, it is arduous to not discuss meals, and dream up the belongings you’ll eat with the recent syrup. Or discuss in regards to the nice meals you’ve concocted with the syrup (or simply drink some heat syrup immediately from the evaporator).

Enter the maple fried egg. After all of the arduous work and lack of sleep, what higher strategy to have fun sugaring season than with a deeply and perhaps too-filling breakfast that makes nice use of the recent syrup and her sidekick, maple sugar. This sandwich is tailored from a recipe in Martin Picard’s utterly genius and maple-centric ebook, Au Pied de Cochon: Sugar Shack, based mostly upon the meals served at his “cabane à sucre” exterior of Montreal. I’ve simplified the recipe in locations, however the root of it stays the identical: the syrup. If the thought of frying an egg in darkish candy liquid turns you off, I’ll recommend you set your prejudices apart and provides it a strive. Maple is now not simply in your latte within the fall. Monitor down Picard’s ebook, and get experimental with it. In any case, winter might lastly be over—boiling sap is likely one of the first indicators that we made it by means of.