(a ) Substances that are added to a food during the processing of such food but are removed in some manner from the food before it is packaged in its finished form.What happens to a pot of starch, potatoes or pasta, at full tilt boogie? You get foam. Same thing happens with sugar solutions. One big difference is that sugar, at below the concentration of finished syrup, is flammable. Granted the flash point is a bit higher than a consumer is liable to subject it to, but at the point of processing, syrup boiling over the front pan could contact the arch and start a fire. That is why all syrup produced indoors uses a de-foaming agent. If you are practicing your craft at it's height, the dogma is no agent reaches the bottle.
(b ) Substances that are added to a food during processing, are converted into constituents normally present in the food, and do not significantly increase the amount of the constitutents[sic] naturally found in the food.
(c ) Substances that are added to a food for their technical or functional effect in the processing but are present in the finished food at insignificant levels and do not have any technical or functional effect in that food.
Beyond the safety issue, even if you could control your fire such that an acceptable amount of foam is present at all times, that foam acts as a trap to steam wanting to escape the environs. If you trap steam, you super heat the liquid below, which means a lower rate of evaporation. All enterprises seek efficiency. I seek them as I do not see using any other source of energy to evaporate than wood. That more and more producers use heating oil to process is a topic for a later post. For now understand that your store bought syrup was liable to be produced at a trade of 1 gallon heating oil for 3 gallons finished syrup. With the calorie being king in this industry, all producers seek to eliminate foam for efficiency as well as avoiding having to find out if their insurance is really what it claims.
In days of yore, or perhaps as late as the 1990's, your maple syrup may have contained pork. It was common for the farmer sugar producer to hang a chunk of salt pork above the sap pan. As sap steamed away it would liquefy the fat, which would drip slowly into the pan below and alter the surface tension of the boiling concentrate. There was a dairy farm a mile up the road from my maternal grandparents in southern Quebec that relied on syrup as a portion of income. I can remember their approach to de-foaming and it involved fat. The fat in question was titrated though a hot dog kept in near constant rotation in the boiling sap. It kept the attendant fed and was always offered up to a visitor for a snack.
Between there and now, I collected a quintessential book on the trade. Helen and Scott Nearing, pioneers of a back to the land movement post World War I, wrote in 1950 about their experiences in The Maple Syrup Book. In the section on how to boil they detail that heavy cream was their choice to keep foam at bay. On page 176 they write that, "[t]his is a more pleasant adaptation of the old-timer's piece of pork hanging over the kettles that was supposed to keep the sap in automatic order."
Today you have a choice of Atmos 300K which is liquid only if heated, or fairy dust; if you buy almost anything other than Organic Syrup. Atmos is a plant fat that through a series of chemicals is suspended to a much smaller droplet size that it would be capable of unprocessed. Same amount of fat in a greater area gives you more de-foaming action with less input. Still, that input has chemicals that up until 50 years ago, basically did not exist. How do we really know how inert they are?
The other commonly used product comes in the form of a powder. It is certified as Kosher. The fat used here is now probably vegetable, although it used to be and sometimes still is beef. So, if you eschew animal products from your diet, this might be something you would want to know. Or, is there a threshold of consumption under which you can still maintain your integrity? McDonald's thought so, just ask about their practice of injecting tallow into french fries to raise their flavour profile.
The problem lies predominately with the producer. Technically the correct amount of de-foamer doing it's job is supposed to leave the product on the wings of steam. There are threaded discussion boards on the internet for Maple Syrup producers to discuss issues and de-foaming is a hotly debated topic. The gurus maintain that if used accordingly, spectroscopic-ally it is undetectable on the other side. I, as a neophyte producer interested in holistic farming, wrestled into the wee hours of the morning researching options. Finally I was all set to use what is touted in the Organic circle as the answer: Safflower oil. Then I wrote a producer in Vermont who I thought had an interesting back story, and was practicing organic principles. They had no luck with oil, and have almost from the get go used heavy cream.
I decided that if I was to err and something was to wind up in the packaging, I wanted it to be something you would nominally eat in the first place; dietary restrictions or allergies aside. I have also since done a calculation. Even if all of what I added was still in place in the final product, it would be 0.001491% of the total contents. Is that enough to give someone the fits if they are lactose intolerant / allergic to milk proteins? I am not sure. My guess is that with all the people that do admit online to using cream that someone who was lactose intolerant / allergic has consumed maple syrup that was de-foamed with heavy cream. The lack of documentation of legal action is also heartening. But, make no mistake, we are a litigious society and sooner or later an ambulance chaser is going to try and establish a precedent. Therefore, I erred on the side of transparency and have informed you the consumer, above and beyond the legal precedent, that there may be a trace amount of dairy in my 100% Pure Maple Syrup.
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