My idea was to do more to impart different flavors into the wood. Namely more caramel type flavors. My cousin and I were in my woodshop, cutting sticks of different woods for aging and making up blanks to be turned into wood lids and talking about different ideas. And that's when we came up with my latest "idea". Below is a run-down of what we did.
We took an 8" diameter sauce pan and added apprx 3-4 cups of sugar and enough water to dissolve the sugar and heated the pan to a slow simmer, stirring often to keep from scorching and to dissolve the sugar thoroughly. We then add 3 sticks of white oak and 3 sticks of maple into the solution and let them soak while simmering for about an hour. We did this with white sugar, dark brown sugar, molasses and pure maple syrup.
After simmering for an hour, we left them to stand overnight, letting the solutions soak into the wood.
The next day, we pulled the wood and hung it to drip dry for a bit. Once they finished dripping, we put them all in an oven to toast at 300F for a few hours to both dry and toast. We watched as the sugar bubbled and caramelized into the wood. The smells coming from the oven were very nice to say the least!
We then removed one oak and one maple stick from each batch, increased heat to 350f and toasted for another hour.
And repeated this again with the last of the sticks and toasted to 400F. I then lightly charred with a butane torch, being as careful as I could to char each piece evenly and for the same amount of time.
The plan being to try 3 different temperature ranges, starting in the middle of the "sweet" temp, increasing to the mid-point between "sweet" and "vanilla", and finishing at the high point of the "vanilla" temp range. We used the graph below as a guide for temperatures.
This is basically a test out of curiosity, just to see what will happen. I like to experiment, and I figure it won't hurt to share my results with all of you.
