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Maple: 100 Sweet and Savory Recipes Featuring Pure Maple Syrup
Maple. The very word conjures up sweet memories of rich amber-colored syrups, indulgent breakfasts, and delicate candy. But that’s just a drop in the sap bucket: this liquid gold works its magic on everything from barbecue sauce to classic cocktails to delectable desserts. Plus it’s a healthier option than other sweeteners.
So step into the sugar shack as seasoned sap-tapper Katie Webster takes you behind the scenes of her backyard maple sugaring hobby. Then try your hand at her Maple Ginger Roasted Salmon or Smoky and Sweet Turkey Chili. Pour yourself a Maple Peach Old Fashioned and enjoy a helping of Bananas Foster Bundt Cake. Explore 100 sweet and savory recipes, including plenty of vegan, gluten-free, and paleo-friendly options, all featuring the incomparable taste of maple.
Selections from the Table of Contents
Breakfasts:
Potato and Sausage Breakfast Skillet with Greens
Snickerdoodle French Toast
Maple Cranberry Walnut Granola
Maple Sweet Potato Coffee Cake
Dutch Baby Pancake with Maple Rhubarb Compote
Drinks and Appetizers:
Maple Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sour
Sugaring Season Hot Cocoa
Pumpkin Maple Dip with Apple Wedges
Skewered Seared Duck with Tabasco Plum Sauce
Maple Cashew Chicken Satay
Soups, Side Dishes, and Salads:
Carrot Ginger Soup with Maple Yogurt
Slow Cooker Chicken Thigh Hot Pot
Sap Baked Beans
Kale Skillet Salad with Walnuts and Maple
Layered Beet and Carrot Salad
Main Courses:
Vermonter Quesadillas with Maple Cream
Chicken, Peanut, and Napa Cabbage Pad Thai
Maple Pork Loin Roast with Apple Chutney
Spicy Peanut Noodles with White Pepper Sirloin
Swordfish with Maple Pipérade
Desserts:
Maple Shortbread Cookies
Maple Date Bread Pudding
Maple Bourbon Pumpkin Pie
Maple Bacon Peanut Brittle
Maple Pear Ginger Sorbet
So step into the sugar shack as seasoned sap-tapper Katie Webster takes you behind the scenes of her backyard maple sugaring hobby. Then try your hand at her Maple Ginger Roasted Salmon or Smoky and Sweet Turkey Chili. Pour yourself a Maple Peach Old Fashioned and enjoy a helping of Bananas Foster Bundt Cake. Explore 100 sweet and savory recipes, including plenty of vegan, gluten-free, and paleo-friendly options, all featuring the incomparable taste of maple.
Selections from the Table of Contents
Breakfasts:
Potato and Sausage Breakfast Skillet with Greens
Snickerdoodle French Toast
Maple Cranberry Walnut Granola
Maple Sweet Potato Coffee Cake
Dutch Baby Pancake with Maple Rhubarb Compote
Drinks and Appetizers:
Maple Meyer Lemon Whiskey Sour
Sugaring Season Hot Cocoa
Pumpkin Maple Dip with Apple Wedges
Skewered Seared Duck with Tabasco Plum Sauce
Maple Cashew Chicken Satay
Soups, Side Dishes, and Salads:
Carrot Ginger Soup with Maple Yogurt
Slow Cooker Chicken Thigh Hot Pot
Sap Baked Beans
Kale Skillet Salad with Walnuts and Maple
Layered Beet and Carrot Salad
Main Courses:
Vermonter Quesadillas with Maple Cream
Chicken, Peanut, and Napa Cabbage Pad Thai
Maple Pork Loin Roast with Apple Chutney
Spicy Peanut Noodles with White Pepper Sirloin
Swordfish with Maple Pipérade
Desserts:
Maple Shortbread Cookies
Maple Date Bread Pudding
Maple Bourbon Pumpkin Pie
Maple Bacon Peanut Brittle
Maple Pear Ginger Sorbet
176 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2015
3 people are currently reading
389 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
January 25, 2018
I have long been intrigued by sugaring. I remember reading about it in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books when I was a child and being amazed that you could simply slice a tree and get syrup from it.
Katie Webster is the force behind Healthy Seasonal Recipes. Until now I wasn't familiar with that blog. But I am so excited to find it...and become a subscriber to her newsletter.
In any case, I love cookbooks with delicious recipes, sumptuous stories, and delectable photographs. This book has it all.
Over the course of the past few months, I have cooked my way through several of Webster's creations...with slight modifications based on what I had in my kitchen. I was inspired to sweeten my chia pudding with maple as well as my hot cocoa. I put maple syrup in my pizza dough as well as my whiskey cocktails. But the recipe that has cemented itself in my salad rotation is her Kale Skillet Salad...with Nuts and Maple.
Such a useful and inspiring cookbook. Love it!
Katie Webster is the force behind Healthy Seasonal Recipes. Until now I wasn't familiar with that blog. But I am so excited to find it...and become a subscriber to her newsletter.
In any case, I love cookbooks with delicious recipes, sumptuous stories, and delectable photographs. This book has it all.
Over the course of the past few months, I have cooked my way through several of Webster's creations...with slight modifications based on what I had in my kitchen. I was inspired to sweeten my chia pudding with maple as well as my hot cocoa. I put maple syrup in my pizza dough as well as my whiskey cocktails. But the recipe that has cemented itself in my salad rotation is her Kale Skillet Salad...with Nuts and Maple.
Such a useful and inspiring cookbook. Love it!
September 26, 2020
I'm somewhat ambivalent about this book. I was excited by the title but felt somewhat let down by the contents. There were some good recipes but I felt it didn't live up to the promise implied by the cover picture.
November 13, 2018
I have tried 5 or 6 recipes from this book and they are all just ok. Nothing spectacular and nothing I feel I would need to make over and over again.
October 20, 2015
I'm a busy home school mom of four--three of them in high school. While I love to cook, with this crazy life sometimes I get a bit lazy about some the little things in cooking--little touches that make the difference between a good dish and a great dish. This cookbook has just changed that. I was in the mood for something sweet, so I decided to try the Maple Walnut Chocolate Chunk Cookies. Normally I wouldn't bother with toasting the walnuts, but I wanted to follow the recipe as completely as I could, so I toasted the walnuts in a pan before mixing the cookies. Wow! It's such a little thing, but between toasting the nuts and adding the maple syrup (I didn't have maple sugar, so I used regular sugar with a generous dollop of maple syrup), they were amazing!! They were a huge hit with my family and moved this cookbook to my "hang onto and cook from often" shelf.
You might think a cookbook on maple syrup would be just desserts, but there are plenty of savory dishes as well. I'm making Maple Glazed Carrots as a side dish with supper tonight. We love baked beans around here so the Sap Baked Beans are on my list to make soon as are the Maple Spiced Pecans. They will go well with our snacky supper we usually do for Thanksgiving night and Christmas Eve.
If you like maple syrup at all, this is a great cookbook for you! Some great history, how-to's for tapping your own sugar maples should you have any, a guide to grades of syrup and so forth just add to the cookbook. I highly recommend it!
I received a copy of this cookbook from Quirk Books for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
You might think a cookbook on maple syrup would be just desserts, but there are plenty of savory dishes as well. I'm making Maple Glazed Carrots as a side dish with supper tonight. We love baked beans around here so the Sap Baked Beans are on my list to make soon as are the Maple Spiced Pecans. They will go well with our snacky supper we usually do for Thanksgiving night and Christmas Eve.
If you like maple syrup at all, this is a great cookbook for you! Some great history, how-to's for tapping your own sugar maples should you have any, a guide to grades of syrup and so forth just add to the cookbook. I highly recommend it!
I received a copy of this cookbook from Quirk Books for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Read
December 28, 2015Maple is one of my very favorite flavors, and one I love to feature on my food blog, Bready or Not. Therefore, I was thrilled when my husband gifted me with one of my wishlist books for Christmas: Maple. This new cookbook features sweet and savory maple recipes ranging from maple margaritas to quick maple frosting to traditional maple-glazed carrots. Maple is melded with chipotle and sweet potatoes and ginger and all sorts of other flavors. The book itself is high quality with thick paper and gorgeous binding--this could be a coffee table book. There is also a lot of information on the history and production of maple, which I find quite fascinating as a California-born gal who has never dealt with a "mud season." I won't give this a star rating yet on the major review sites since I haven't tried any recipes yet, but I will. Oh yes, I will. I think I noted pages of about two dozen recipes I want to try, and I hope to get on that task this very week. The maple walnut chocolate chip cookies are begging to be made...
January 6, 2016
A well-assembled collection based one of Nature's greatest
gifts to the taste buds (the other being honey). No reviewer
would survive attempting all of the recipes, each of which is
given a full-page presentation and a superlative photograph.
The book itself is done to the highest standard of materials
(clay paper) and craftsmanship (outstanding color separation
work by the production crew), and the lead-in recipes from
the breakfast and comfort zone ranges lead to some truly
interesting partakings such as Asian Pork Cabbage Cups. The
sugar tree harvest weeks will be coming soon, and this book
will be a welcome item in many kitchens this Spring.
This book was given to me through Goodreads, in expectation of
a review; the opinion as expressed is mine.
gifts to the taste buds (the other being honey). No reviewer
would survive attempting all of the recipes, each of which is
given a full-page presentation and a superlative photograph.
The book itself is done to the highest standard of materials
(clay paper) and craftsmanship (outstanding color separation
work by the production crew), and the lead-in recipes from
the breakfast and comfort zone ranges lead to some truly
interesting partakings such as Asian Pork Cabbage Cups. The
sugar tree harvest weeks will be coming soon, and this book
will be a welcome item in many kitchens this Spring.
This book was given to me through Goodreads, in expectation of
a review; the opinion as expressed is mine.
January 31, 2016
i was hoping there would be some cool uses for maple syrup, but it just seemed like sweetening things with maple syrup and maple sugar (which makes sense, but i wasn't wowed).
the apricot chevre french toast, maple sweet potato coffee cake and maple tahini chicken and broccoli sounded interesting enough, but a 3% interest rate for the recipes wasn't quite enough to make me love this book.
the apricot chevre french toast, maple sweet potato coffee cake and maple tahini chicken and broccoli sounded interesting enough, but a 3% interest rate for the recipes wasn't quite enough to make me love this book.
Want to read
February 10, 2016I enjoyed reading the recipes. I didn't know Maple syrup could go in so many dishes. The book is beautiful and easy to understand. I have not try any recipes yet, but I am excited to try them out.
February 1, 2016
This is a very good book for someone who wants to try to make her own maple syrup. It also has a number of interesting recipes as well.
May 28, 2016
Great looking book from front cover to back. I can't wait to try the recipes. Thank you!
January 30, 2017
Oh, so delicious...
Read
November 9, 2018Alright, let's talk about the features and recipes of this cookbook:
There are symbols for listing if a recipe is gluten-free, vegan, and/or paleo. Some recipes naturally fit the bill and some require straightforward substitutions. Many recipes include a picture of the final product, but not all of them do. There is a page on the history of sugar making from trees, a little information on how to do sugaring, some science of sugar, and--something I found especially useful--a guide to maple syrup grades and the conversion between the old standard names (such as Grade B) and the new standard names (now called Grade A Dark), as well as the different tastes between them.
There are notes in the back of the book that include definitions for "dice", chop", and "julienne". There are also definitions of ingredient and notes about some specific ingredients, such as which butter to use (unsalted). There are some useful websites listed and explained, as well as conversion charts to metric. All in all, it's not information-heavy (which is what some people prefer in a cookbook), but it does cover the basics.
I was pleased to see there was a variety of recipes and that maple syrup isn't just used to make desserts! The book is organized into:
breakfasts (eg. maple chia pudding cups, dutch baby pancake with maple rhubarb compote, and various fruit- and spice-infused maple syrups)
drinks and appetizers (eg. mapletini, crispy pita rounds with goat cheese, and maple cashew chicken satay)
soups, side dishes, and salads (eg. sweet potato and peanut soup, sweet and sour coleslaw, and cauliflower salad with black sesame)
main courses (eg. maple wheat pizza dough, Vermonter quesadillas with maple cream, and maple pork loin roast with apple chutney)
desserts (eg. maple shortbread cookies, rustic pear galette, and pure maple candy)
The baking recipes (and all recipes) are by volume (cups) instead of weight (ounces or grams). Weight is much more precise and consistent, but many home cooks still use just cups. Also, this isn't a precision cookbook the way an America's Test Kitchen cookbook is, and that's okay--they're different styles.
The health benefits of maple syrup discussed in the introduction are overrated. But, she mentions it briefly and does point out you shouldn't eat too much sugar in a day anyway, even giving the daily recommendations from The American Heart Association. However, she does not point out that such small amounts of sugar in a diet mean small amounts of the "health benefits" of maple syrup, such as the nutrients. Overall, maple syrup isn't "healthy" the way vegetables are healthy, but it is less bad for you than white sugar.
Niche cookbooks focusing on a single ingredient like this one make you think you can cook ANYTHING with that ingredient. The author does give useful tips for experimenting with maple in other recipes, and things to consider when converting between white sugar and maple syrup, agave and maple, etc. But really, besides differing in taste, other sugars do have their own properties and effects in baking and cooking, and many cooks can have reasons for not eliminating or substituting those ingredients. I'm not going to start making everything with maple syrup, but I can't poo-poo cookbooks such as this, either. Some say a cookbook focusing on a single ingredient like maple syrup is too narrow or uncreative. Really, there is a ton of creativity because the focus on using the single ingredient--in this case, maple syrup--to fill up a whole cookbook means there will be recipes and uses that are against the grain and status quo.
Therefore, while this book isn't for me, that doesn't make it a bad book. It serves its purpose for maple-lovers everywhere who want to expand their maple-based repertoire, and it provides a variety of recipes in general.
There are symbols for listing if a recipe is gluten-free, vegan, and/or paleo. Some recipes naturally fit the bill and some require straightforward substitutions. Many recipes include a picture of the final product, but not all of them do. There is a page on the history of sugar making from trees, a little information on how to do sugaring, some science of sugar, and--something I found especially useful--a guide to maple syrup grades and the conversion between the old standard names (such as Grade B) and the new standard names (now called Grade A Dark), as well as the different tastes between them.
There are notes in the back of the book that include definitions for "dice", chop", and "julienne". There are also definitions of ingredient and notes about some specific ingredients, such as which butter to use (unsalted). There are some useful websites listed and explained, as well as conversion charts to metric. All in all, it's not information-heavy (which is what some people prefer in a cookbook), but it does cover the basics.
I was pleased to see there was a variety of recipes and that maple syrup isn't just used to make desserts! The book is organized into:
breakfasts (eg. maple chia pudding cups, dutch baby pancake with maple rhubarb compote, and various fruit- and spice-infused maple syrups)
drinks and appetizers (eg. mapletini, crispy pita rounds with goat cheese, and maple cashew chicken satay)
soups, side dishes, and salads (eg. sweet potato and peanut soup, sweet and sour coleslaw, and cauliflower salad with black sesame)
main courses (eg. maple wheat pizza dough, Vermonter quesadillas with maple cream, and maple pork loin roast with apple chutney)
desserts (eg. maple shortbread cookies, rustic pear galette, and pure maple candy)
The baking recipes (and all recipes) are by volume (cups) instead of weight (ounces or grams). Weight is much more precise and consistent, but many home cooks still use just cups. Also, this isn't a precision cookbook the way an America's Test Kitchen cookbook is, and that's okay--they're different styles.
The health benefits of maple syrup discussed in the introduction are overrated. But, she mentions it briefly and does point out you shouldn't eat too much sugar in a day anyway, even giving the daily recommendations from The American Heart Association. However, she does not point out that such small amounts of sugar in a diet mean small amounts of the "health benefits" of maple syrup, such as the nutrients. Overall, maple syrup isn't "healthy" the way vegetables are healthy, but it is less bad for you than white sugar.
Niche cookbooks focusing on a single ingredient like this one make you think you can cook ANYTHING with that ingredient. The author does give useful tips for experimenting with maple in other recipes, and things to consider when converting between white sugar and maple syrup, agave and maple, etc. But really, besides differing in taste, other sugars do have their own properties and effects in baking and cooking, and many cooks can have reasons for not eliminating or substituting those ingredients. I'm not going to start making everything with maple syrup, but I can't poo-poo cookbooks such as this, either. Some say a cookbook focusing on a single ingredient like maple syrup is too narrow or uncreative. Really, there is a ton of creativity because the focus on using the single ingredient--in this case, maple syrup--to fill up a whole cookbook means there will be recipes and uses that are against the grain and status quo.
Therefore, while this book isn't for me, that doesn't make it a bad book. It serves its purpose for maple-lovers everywhere who want to expand their maple-based repertoire, and it provides a variety of recipes in general.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews