Rex and Janet Russell show a candy mold in their shop at Endless Mountains Cabin. The couple make thousands of pieces of maple candy a year.

A bit of bliss

ROME – Have a bite of bliss.

The light brown candy glistens with a sugary sheen, like new-fallen snow crystals in your yard on a bright winter afternoon. You crunch into it and the candy crumbles and tumbles and plays around your tongue, kissing it with an innocent, brown, outdoors-y sort of sweetness, then melts away to make room for more.

And that’s what you want. More!

Maple candy is one of the sweetest gifts ever from nature. From nature and folks like Rex and Janet Russell, that is.

You may know Rex and Janet for their maple syrup business near Rome, Endless Mountains Cabin. Maple syrup is made in the late winter and early spring. But what you might not know is the two actually work year-round bringing us candy, and candy, and more candy. By themselves. By hand. All the time.

“It’s about the same all the year,” Janet says of the candy business.

Rex once figured they made 14,000-15,000 pieces of candy per year. In 2011, they used up at least 25 drums of syrup on it. They supply 126 stores.

“Everything we do is a two-person operation, isn’t it Rex?” Janet says. “Pretty much,” he agrees.

So how do these little candies — shaped like maple leaves, bunnies, grapes, men — come about? It all starts with the syrup.

In late winter and spring the hearts of maple trees begin beating with excitement over the coming warm days, pumping sap through their trunks. Maple producers put plugs, or “taps” into the trees and draw out sap, which they boil down into syrup. (That in itself is another story!)

To make the candy, the Russells use light, or “fancy,” syrup. Light syrup usually comes from early-season sap, but a cold snap can bring on more. “It all depends on the weather,” Rex explains. Maple season usually runs from mid-February to early April.

So they bring the syrup into the little kitchen beside their sales room and go to work.

On a recent afternoon Janet packages candy leaves there, the room around her fairly bursting with a sweet maple smell. Shelves by one wall hold candy molds; a sink and counter line another. Scales and a kettle stand nearby.

They pour the light syrup into a “pig,” a metal container that looks something like, well, a pig.

“We boil it,” Rex explains. “Bring it to a boil.” The syrup cooks 1 ½ hours at 32 degrees above the boiling point of water which, at this elevation, is 242 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Then we let it cool,” he says, but just to 228 or 230. Then they pour the hot syrup out the pig’s “snout” into a trough with a spiral wire, which sends it into little molds. One pigful can make 22 dozen pieces of candy.

They let the molds cool a full day. Then they pop out the shaped candy and soak it eight to 12 hours in room-temperature syrup, or “mother syrup.” These treatments give the candy its “crystal coating,” Rex says, and provide a longer shelf life.

“We don’t add anything,” Janet says.

“It’s more healthy than your processed sugar,” Rex insists. Maple candy’s pure, he says — all the way from the tree.

Whew. Boiling, pouring, boiling, soaking — after all that, a piece of candy needs a rest. Which it gets. The candy sets and dries two days.

OK, it’s time to go. Janet packs it, piece by piece, one at a time. She grabs a little bag, gently tosses in a piece of candy and sets it aside. “This table will hold 10 dozen,” she says. Then she seals them with a little heating machine and puts on the gold Russell labels. Janet can package 20-25 dozen candies an hour.

Rex and Janet get a lot of business from Route 187 passers-by, but they also fill Internet orders and deliver candy to stores as far away as East Syracuse, Horseheads, Williamsport, Danville and Watkins Glen.

Russell Maple Farms

Up the hill, Don Russell and his family also run a maple business. (Don’s grandfather and Rex’s father were brothers.) There, they make and sell candy in a kitchen attached to their house.

They recently supplied the Farm Show with about 80 pounds of candy. They also contribute 25-40 pounds for both the Mill Grove Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary show and the Green Lane Reservoir Nature Center, and produce 30-40 pounds of boxed candy.

“But certainly not to the scale that Rex and Janet are doing,” Don says.

But, he adds — “there’s certainly enough to get a sugar high!”

He agrees with Rex and Janet that maple candy is all-natural and points out researchers are looking into its possible health benefits.

Don’s wife, Deb, and their son Adam work together in the maple business. Don’s father, Carlyle, taught Adam how to make candy.

Today, Adam’s an avid maple man. Years ago, reporter Bill Ralph took a picture of young Adam in the sap house, getting a drink of syrup. “He’s had maple syrup in his veins ever since!” Dan says.

“He likes it when all the taps are almost running over!” he adds. During the season the younger Russell might sleep only a couple of hours a night — instead of his usual 14-16, Don claims.

Adam laughs. For the record, he denies sleeping 14-16 hours a day.

And other goodies

So maybe you don’t eat a lot of syrup or candy. Could Rex and Janet interest you in some cream? Or sugar?

To make cream, they again start with light syrup but boil it only at 233 and not as long as candy. They cool it to 60 or 70 degrees in tubs with water running under, then stir it 20 minutes with paddles in a turntable.

That gets it to that buttery-like thickness, just right to spread on, as the jar reads, “toast, pancakes, waffles and hot cereals.” Even “on a peanut butter sandwich.” Getting ideas? Or forget that. Just grab a spoon or dive in with your pointy little finger and lap it down “right out of the jar,” the label suggests. (Well, it doesn’t say “pointy little finger.” You get the idea.)

Rex and Janet make 45-47 pounds of cream per batch, and have about four cream-making sessions a year.

To make sugar, they simply heat the syrup extremely hot, to 255, in the kettle on the counter. That dries up most of the moisture. Then Janet gets out a big bowl, dumps the mixture in and stirs, stirs, stirs. It finally turns to sugar.

Try doing that three days in a row. Your body will hurt.

But Rex and Janet do it all. Boil and pack and stir and deliver ... candy and cream and sugar. All year every year.

So you can bite into bliss. Then have some more.