NJ aiming to muscle way for spot in maple syrup industry
GALLOWAY TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Welcome to New Jersey, known around the world for Tony Soprano, Turnpike tolls, chemical plants and ... maple syrup?
If a university in the southern part of the state has its way, the sticky sweet brown stuff you put on your pancakes might one day come from New Jersey.
It’s part of an effort to use a species of maple tree common to southern New Jersey that has only half as much sugar as the maples of Vermont, the nation’s maple syrup capital. The idea is to see if a viable syrup industry can be created in a part of the state better known for casinos and its vast forest of pine trees.
Backed by $1 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Stockton University is in its fourth year of producing syrup from the 300 acres of maples surrounding it.
“You should never tell a New Jerseyan, ‘It can’t be done,’ because we live for the challenge,” said Judith Vogel, a mathematics professor and director of the Stockton Maple Project. “There were a lot of obstacles to be overcome in bringing maple syrup production to south Jersey, but the work has been fun, and the results have been very sweet.”
The key to the project is utilizing some underdog trees that are not in the same class as the sugar maples typical of Vermont. Although there are some sugar maples in the northern part of New Jersey, Stockton is located in southern New Jersey, about 16 miles northwest of Atlantic City, where red maples are more common.
Although maple syrup has been made in New Jersey since the state was populated mainly by Native Americans, who shared their knowledge with settlers, no large-scale industry took hold, particularly in the state’s south.
Red maples like those in Stockton “are not highly sought-after because the sugar content is significantly lower, about 1% coming from a red maple versus about 2% for a sugar maple,” said Ryan Hegarty, assistant director of the Maple Project.
The rule of thumb is that it takes about 40 gallons of sap from sugar maples of the Vermont variety to make 1 gallon of syrup, Hegarty said. For red maples, you need at least 60 gallons of sap because more water needs to be removed in the process of making syrup.
That is accomplished by using a high-pressure membrane to separate sugar and water molecules. That enables sap that came out of the tree at 1% sugar to enter the cooking process at 4%, an important efficiency if a new industry is to be established using sub-optimal trees.
Charlize Katzenbach has been making maple syrup for 35 years at her Sweet Sourland Farms in Hopewell, New Jersey, 80 miles northwest of Stockton. When she first started making syrup in the 1980s, New Jersey was a hard sell.
“No one would buy it,” said Katzenbach, who advised Stockton on setting up its program. “They’d say, ‘I get my syrup from Vermont; this can’t be any good at all.’ ”
But years of perseverance, and a growing desire for locally produced food, helped carve out a small niche for New Jersey maple syrup.
In 2022, New Jersey produced 1,817 gallons of it, worth $88,000, according to the state agriculture department. By contrast, Vermont produces half of the nearly 6 million gallons of maple syrup sold each year in the United States, worth about $105 million, according to the federal agriculture department.
Allison Hope, executive director of the Vermont Maple Sugar Makers Association, said those federal figures are believed to be an undercount, with the real total somewhat higher.
Coming straight out of the tree, the sap tastes like water. Only after it is cooked in a wood-fired device called an evaporator does the sugar content soar.
Stockton’s syrup is darker and richer than commercially sold syrup, and has an oh-so-slightly smoky taste from the cooking process. The university is already using the syrup in its food service program to create new flavors of salad dressing and barbecue sauce, and also sells it at farmers’ markets.