What can I do with the sugar sand byproduct of maple syrup?

Not trying to hijack the thread but can't find this anywhere else. Does anyone have any experience with the sugar sand byproduct of maple syrup? I'm trying to find out if there's a use for it or if  there's a method to extract the syrup from the sediment. (Like using a centrifuge)
We've got Amish neighbors that tap our trees and last year there was a lot of the sand but they just dump it.

I'm a long way from maple syrup country (which makes me sad).

But I recall that some methods of brewing compost tea involve the addition of molasses. Perhaps the residual sugar in your waste product might have a hidden value?

Jim said, "We've got Amish neighbors that tap our trees and last year there was a lot of the sand but they just dump it.

To me, it seems that the Amish would figure out a way to market sugar sand.

When I lived in Mexico the sugar was coarse and had a brownish tint.

This reminds me of what "sugar sand" would look like.

Would there possibly be a market for "Course Maple Flavored Sugar" for baking and decorating?

Something similar to turbinado sugar only maple flavor?

I wonder if something like mead could be made from it instead of using honey.

https://permies.com/t/69692/kitchen/honey-wine-call-mead

https://permies.com/t/47681/kitchen/Mead

Another suggestion would be to make microbes:

https://permies.com/t/25813/DIY-Indigenous-Microorganism-Culture#1740719

https://permies.com/t/80/56107/story-microbes-accomplish-miracles-culture#475101

I hope you will let us know how you decided to use sugar sand as this sounds like a wonderful opportunity to use something being thrown out.

Hmm, I make syrup and I don't know where/how you'd separate the sand...  

I filter the syrup before bottling but the stuff the filter catches is a black/brown sludge.   If you reheat your syrup after filtering and get it over 190F I've been told it will develop sugar sand in the sealed bottles. But then how would you remove it without having to reheat and rebottle?  

Or are they on such a large scale that they let it settle out in drums before bottling?

does it taste like sugar? or sand?

maple sugar and maple candy are delicious.

This comes off their large wood fired evaporator but I don't know at what point. When the specific gravity is reached, it's drained into a large container that they bottle from. Maybe it settles out in that?

It's sweet maple flavored but a tan paste, fine texture. We used the sample I had last year in ice-cream and coffee. Didn't really try much else, banking on there being more this year.

Jim Koehler wrote:This comes off their large wood fired evaporator but I don't know at what point. When the specific gravity is reached, it's drained into a large container that they bottle from. Maybe it settles out in that?

It's sweet maple flavored but a tan paste, fine texture. We used the sample I had last year in ice-cream and coffee. Didn't really try much else, banking on there being more this year.

Oh, my! One of my former guilty pleasures (before conventional wheat made me so sick) was McGriddles. You know the ones - they have their own, internal source of maple syrup? I am pretty sure I could find a way to use that, to make them!

I can remember the mcgriddle but never had one, like their burgers, I  imagine homemade looks and tastes a lot better.
Now I wish this season was producing the sand to play with some of these ideas. Hopefully the university ag extension will have more insight into what it actually is.

Jim Koehler wrote:I can remember the mcgriddle but never had one, like their burgers, I  imagine homemade looks and tastes a lot better.
Now I wish this season was producing the sand to play with some of these ideas. Hopefully the university ag extension will have more insight into what it actually is.

For years, I've been toying with the idea of how to make these things. The last couple months, while everyone was tapping their sugar maples & other trees, it occurred to me that I could probably add some unflavored, grass fed gelatin to some maple syrup, chill it, spice it into very thin strips, and lay them into pre-cooking pancakes &/or waffles. Then, freeze them, to warm up for homemade mcgriddle sammies, whenever I want them. Then this thread happened, and it seems like an even easier way to do it.

I've talked to a few bigger operators and now I understand that when they filter (or filter press) the syrup they generate the sugar sand.  One person I talked to used it, mixed in syrup, to make granolas and breads.  Apparently the grittiness of the sugar sand wasn't as noticeable then.

I made a very small batch producing about 1 quart of syrup. But I was left with this very nice maple sand. I only had about a quarter of a cup, so I mixed it with equal amounts of butter and made diy maple butter.

Pumpernickle Bread, Boston Baked Beans, Candied Yams,  ect.  I would use it in any recipe calling for molasses.

I like making fruit syrups by covering the fruit with an equal amount of granulated sugar.
The sugar draws the moisture out of the fruit, the resulting syrup is quite stable.
Maple banana syrup sounds appealing to me, especially since I get so many free bananas from dumpsters.

Sugared nuts are delicious, maple sugared walnuts, pecans or almonds should be amazing.

Selling any leftover of the sugaring process as a health supplement should be easy.
The tree did a lot of work collecting the nutrients, giving your body a stab at absorbing them seems like a good idea.
I wonder if it could be combined with salts to make supplements for athletes and outdoor workers?

"Maple syrup sand," also known as "niter," is a natural sediment composed of minerals (primarily calcium and magnesium) that precipitates out of maple sap as it's concentrated and boiled, appearing as cloudiness or gritty sediment in the syrup.
Here's a more detailed explanation:
Formation:
As maple sap is boiled down to create syrup, the water evaporates, and the minerals in the sap become more concentrated.
Appearance:
This concentrated mineral buildup appears as a gritty sediment or cloudiness in the syrup, often settling at the bottom of containers.
Safety:
Sugar sand is perfectly safe to eat and is not a sign of spoilage.
Removal:
While not harmful, sugar sand can be removed through filtering, allowing for clearer syrup.
Factors affecting formation:
The amount of sugar sand can vary based on the minerals present in the sap, which can differ geographically and from year to year.
Impact on syrup:
Too much sugar sand can cause pan overheating and off flavors in the syrup.
Removal methods:
Sugar sand can be removed by filtering syrup, letting it sit so the sand settles, or by cleaning evaporator pans.

Mike Haasl wrote:Hmm, I make syrup and I don't know where/how you'd separate the sand...  
I filter the syrup before bottling but the stuff the filter catches is a black/brown sludge.   If you reheat your syrup after filtering and get it over 190F I've been told it will develop sugar sand in the sealed bottles. But then how would you remove it without having to reheat and rebottle?  
Or are they on such a large scale that they let it settle out in drums before bottling?

It isn't really "sand". The real name is "niter" and no harm will come from drinking it but it does look cloudy at the bottom of the jar, so it isn't as appetizing. So if you are in the business of selling the syrup, you want to remove it with one more filtration perhaps? For more, read on:
https://puttingupwiththeturnbulls.com/2011/04/13/sugar-sand-chalk-it-up-to-learning-experience/#:~:text=re%2Dfiltered%20it.-,Why?,this%20be%20a%20lesson%20learned.

I would try it as a sugar alternative. From the post on niter, it also sounds like an ideal carbohydrate and cal-mag source for compost teas. I have used subpar or old barley tea/wert from brewing for compost tea food with nice results.

Ben Zumeta wrote:I would try it as a sugar alternative. From the post on niter, it also sounds like an ideal carbohydrate and cal-mag source for compost teas. I have used subpar or old barley tea/wert from brewing for compost tea food with nice results.

I like the idea of using it as compost tea. that sounds like the easiest way to make use of it.

Something I might try - maple herbal vinegar. The niter is mostly precipitated minerals, right? If they dissolve in vinegar, you might end up with a high mineral tonic - people use clean eggshells to make bone vinegar, maybe niter would be similar?

I just finished my first season of being involved with maple syrup production. I was a hired hand on an Orthodox Mennonite small farm in SW Ontario. We had over 1300 taps, all collected by buckets and horse-drawn sleigh or wagon. So I guess you could call this guy a smallish big operator.

The man I worked for had wondered this exact thing about what to do with the sugar sand, since it clearly still contained a lot of syrup, so he'd figured out a way to recover most of the syrup.
First of all, we swished the filter in the boiling sap to rinse out some of the syrup, then hung it on the edge of the pan with clothespins to drip into the pan for half an hour or so. Then we tipped the sugar sound out of the filter and washed the filter inside out in three pails of hot water. At the end of the boiling, the wash water went into the bucket with the sand, and we stirred it up thoroughly. He'd take a brix test with a refractometer and add water (using more buckets as needed) to get it below 12%.

The next time we boiled, the sand would all be settled in the bottom of the bucket, and the water above would be fairly clear and full of sugar. We carefully poured off the water without disturbing the sand (back in my high school chem lab we called this "decanting the supernatent") into the back pan, and the sugar would come through in that day's syrup minus the sand! He calculated that we would get at least 5% extra syrup with not that much extra boiling by doing all this.

If you don't dilute it enough, the sand still contains a fair bit of sugar and it's worth adding water and letting it sit one more time.

We'd discard the sand after this washing process. I still wonder if the sand itself is useful for anything.

The sitting water/sand does get kind of slimy over time, which I think is the same microbial phenomenon that makes the syrup darker toward the end of the season when your buckets and tanks are all a little dirty, so if you really value light syrup (I don't), you might not want to use the sugar sand.

For a little more context:

The evaporator was wood-fired, 5'x16', with a front pan for finishing, a back pan for primary boiling, and a preheater pan on top of the back pan that used the steam to heat the sap to near a boil before it ever got on the stove.
The "sand" seems to form on the syrup side of the evaporator (right where the syrup is most concentrated) It sticks to the pan a bit in a thin layer, and I was taught that syrup can get under this layer and burn, so every 4 hours of boiling, we would "reverse," which meant switching the hardware around to the other side of the front pan and take syrup off from there so that the thinner sap would be coming in on the side with the precipitate to wash it loose. I've heard of other setups where they never reverse and it doesn't burn, so make of that what you will.

We'd filter the syrup as we took it off every third to half an hour. One batch of syrup would be 10-15 L or so, and leave a few cups of sugar sand in the filters (variable amount depending on how long ago we'd reversed).