There’s no better time to make use of maple syrup than in late winter and early spring, when the trees are tapped and the sap is boiled and bottled throughout the Northeast and Canada. We love the woody sweetness it adds to crêpes, bread pudding, and pie, but maple syrup isn’t just for desserts—it also pairs well with roasted meats and vegetables (especially those that are orange). Here are our best recipes starring the liquid gold.

Maple-Marinated Mustard Seeds

Montreal-based chef Laurent Dagenais likes to call this punchy, savory-sweet condiment “mustard caviar.” Use it to up the luxe factor on your next cheese plate or charcuterie board. Get the recipe >

Maple Parsnip Soup

Maple syrup brings out the natural sweetness of parsnips in this silky soup topped with crunchy, homemade garlic-thyme croutons. Get the recipe >

Maple Pork Shank With Buttered Cabbage

Transform a pork shank into a flavorful, company-worthy centerpiece by braising it with maple syrup and serving it on a bed of bacon-studded greens. Get the recipe >

Spicy Maple Roasted Chicken With Sweet Potato Oven Fries

Maple syrup sweetens the spice paste—fragrant with cumin, coriander, fennel, ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon—used to marinate a whole bird in this hearty supper from British Indian chef Romy Gill. Get the recipe >

New England-Style Baked Beans

Maple syrup adds sweetness and depth to these beans slow-cooked with smoky bacon or salt pork. Serve with plenty of brown bread to mop up all that luscious sauce. Get the recipe >

Molly O’Neill’s LongHouse Granola

The recipe for this life-changing granola comes from the late chef and food writer Molly O’Neill. It’s chock-full of oats, nuts, seeds, coconut, and raisins and is sweetened with a combo of maple syrup and honey. Get the recipe > 

Canadian Butter Tarts

Maple syrup is integral to the gooey, runny interior that these beloved sweet treats are known for. We highly recommend eating them over a plate to catch any filling that pours out. Get the recipe >

Cast Iron Squash Pudding

In this cakelike dessert from legendary Montreal restaurant Joe Beef, maple syrup brings out the earthy sweetness of the two types of squash—butternut and delicata. Get the recipe >

Crêpes With Maple Sugar and Syrup

It’s no surprise that these thin pancakes are layered and rolled with both maple syrup and sugar, as the dish comes from Bas-St-Laurent, Quebec’s second-largest maple syrup-producing region. Get the recipe >

Apple and Kale Salad With Black Sesame-Maple Cashews

Coated with maple syrup and black sesame seeds, crunchy cashews not only elevate this simple salad, but they also make an excellent snack on their own. Get the recipe >

Maple and Mustard-Glazed Ham

Celebrated chef Hugh Acheson balances out the sharpness of Dijon mustard and tanginess of cider vinegar with maple syrup in the glaze for this showstopping fresh ham. Get the recipe >

Bread Pudding With Caramel Sauce

Maple syrup enriches the batter for this bread pudding redolent with cinnamon and studded with raisins. Get the recipe >

Maple Syrup Milkshake

Vanilla ice cream is the perfect partner for maple syrup in this four-ingredient milkshake. Get the recipe >

Maple Pumpkin Brûlée Pie

Maple syrup is folded into the warmly spiced filling of this riff on the classic dessert. A dramatic caramelized top serves as the perfect finishing touch. Get the recipe >

Carrots Vichy

In the traditional version of this French side, carrots are cooked in water with sugar and butter to create a glaze. Here, chef Hugh Acheson swaps out the sugar for maple syrup and adds fresh marjoram and chiles, yielding an earthier dish with just the right amount of heat. Get the recipe >

Maple Syrup-Roasted Tomatoes

Transform humdrum cherry or grape tomatoes into flavor bombs by cooking them low and slow in the oven with maple syrup, thyme, and garlic. Get the recipe >

Wild Rice Soup With Maple Syrup

Sweet maple syrup plays nicely with earthy mushrooms and thyme in this rich, creamy soup. Get the recipe >

Maple Syrup Dumplings

Spoonfuls of buttery dough are cooked in a pot of boiling maple syrup for these rich dumplings. Get the recipe >

Maple-Glazed Carrots With Hazelnut Crumbs

Juicy orange segments cut through the sweetness of maple syrup in this colorful, beautifully balanced side dish finished with fresh cilantro. Get the recipe >

Maple Squares with Walnuts

This one’s for the real maple heads: these chewy dessert squares call for both maple syrup and maple sugar. Serve them in shallow bowls with a splash of cream on top. Get the recipe >

Wet Nuts

This popular sundae topping gets its gooey sweetness from a mixture of maple syrup and light corn syrup. Get the recipe >

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These oatmeal cookies are the reason Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi decided to become a baker. She learned the recipe from her grandmother while growing up and made it her own by adding sweetened shredded coconut for a sharper, chewier cookie. She also highly recommends following her grandma’s storage advice: put your cookies back in the oatmeal container with a slice of bread to keep them fresh.

Adapted from Milk Bar Life: Recipes & Stories by Christina Tosi. Copyright © 2015. Available from Clarkson Potter.

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When Canadian butter tarts are made properly, the gooey brown sugar and maple syrup filling pours out, so eat them over a plate. Everyone will love the trifecta of flaky pastry, runny center, and chewy top in these sweet treats.

Featured in: Our Best Recipes of All Time

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Instead of coating his pâte de fruit with plain white sugar, Bay Area pastry chef William Werner flavors Demerara sugar with Clément Créole Shrubb, a liqueur made of aged and white rhum agricole and bitter orange peels.

Featured in: “Our Best Strawberry Recipes Let the Fruit Shine Like Never Before.”

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Danny Bowien likes to serves this steamy chicken pho for breakfast. The dish is inspired by the Vietnamese soups he ate at San Francisco’s Turtle Tower when he was a culinary student. The chef simmers the simple chicken broth for just a short period after bringing it to a boil because he feels that overcooking causes the flavor of the aromatics to go flat.

Find this recipe in our cookbook SAVEUR: Soups and Stews.

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These skillet-cooked bitter greens, from Atlanta-based chef and restaurateur Linton Hopkins, get a flavor boost from garlic confit and sorghum gastrique. Lighter in flavor than molasses, sorghum syrup is frequently used as a sweetener for Southern dishes ranging from cornmeal mush to candied yams. Combined with vinegar and Sriracha, it becomes a regionally-inflected sweet-and-sour sauce.

Featured in: “The Glories of Garlic.”

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On an October morning, as the first frost crisped the pastures in east Tennessee, I drove from my home in Knoxville to the little town of Monterey to visit Pete Guenther and his family. By the time I arrived, Pete and his family had been up for hours harvesting sorghum, a cereal crop domesticated in Africa some 5,000 years ago. The Guenthers have grown the plant, Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench, since 1981 on ridge-top fields overlooking Muddy Pond Road, their mill’s two-lane namesake. They grow it not for its grain, but because the stalks flow with a watery, lightly sweet sap that, when boiled down, yields a thick table syrup redolent of dark caramel and wood smoke.

Up until the post-WWII spread of cheap refined sugar, sorghum syrup was the primary sweetener used in the South. Now, after nearly a century of decline, the revival of small-scale sorghum production in the southern Appalachians is a symbol of cultural continuity and a boon for those eager to get their hands on the stuff. “It used to be hard to find sorghum many places,” said Guenther, “but it’s making a comeback. A lot of young chefs are beginning to cook with it.”

Sorghum is often confused with molasses, but there are fundamental differences between the two. True molasses is made from sugarcane—Saccharum officinarum—a tropical grass that has a year-round growing season but is limited in range by frost. Sorghum bicolor grows any place corn will, as far north as Michigan. Planted in late spring, it reaches gangly maturity—some 12 to 14 feet tall, looking from a distance like corn that’s vaulted to basketball-player stature—in early fall. While true molasses originally flowed from the Caribbean’s vast sugar plantations, sorghum is a quintessential product of the small American farm.

“Sorghum came with the African slaves,” explained Muddy Pond’s Craig Whitman, who looks the part of community elder with his faded overalls and snowy beard. “With the Civil War, both governments realized they had a shortage of sugar, so they encouraged people to plant sorghum. Within a generation, about every farm in Tennessee had a patch of sorghum cane.”

A hundred years earlier, refined sugar had been relatively scarce in colonial America. It wouldn’t become an everyday staple until the waning years of the 19th century. During that same period, American sorghum production grew to a peak of some 24 million gallons a year in the 1880s, and huge quantities were shipped north to manufacture rum and molasses beer. In Southern kitchens, sorghum was prized as an everyday luxury. “I could make a meal on sorghum with butter and a biscuit,” said nonagenarian Don Hemphill at an annual sorghum-making event, which is held each year by the McEntire family in Old Fort, North Carolina.

“It’s important to keep the art alive,” said Gerald McEntire, one of nine siblings born on the 150-year old Peaceful Valley Farm family farm, which also produces heirloom white corn for cornmeal, grits, and moonshine. “We want the kids to see what you can do with corn and sorghum. This story is important.”

The McEntires make enough sorghum annually for their own use, with surplus to sell for $5 a pint to the hundreds of neighbors and visitors who come for the day’s festival atmosphere.

“Making [sorghum] is not about the money,” said Gerald’s brother John. “It’s about liking it.”

The work to produce a “run” of sorghum will usually begin on Friday, when a crew goes to the field to strip the mature cane of its leaves and top the seed heads, a few of which will be saved for next year’s planting. The following morning, the cane is cut at ground level with a swift chop of a hatchet-like cane knife, and milled between heavy rollers to extract the juice. Mills were once turned by horses or mules that trudged a circular path at the end of a long swing arm. These days they are usually run on engines. The collected juice is strained and reduced at a steady boil in a shallow steel pan. Because the pans are homemade, their construction reflects local habits and traditions. In Sharp’s Chapel, Tennessee, the Houston family cooks in a pan that is about the size and shape of a sleeping cot and rests on a clay-lined fire pit. Dogwood provides the best coals, according to Jim Houston, who took over as sorghum boss after his Uncle Willy passed away a few years back at 101 years old.

“You reduce it ten to one,” said Houston, as a light green sorghum juice trickled from his tractor-powered mill to slowly fill a zinc tub. “You think this is slow? You should have seen it when we used mules.”

Examples of sorghum’s antique technology can be seen at Cades Cove, an open-air museum in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, where the Guenthers keep a pair of draft horses hitched to their original mill for demonstration purposes. Today, however, they rely on machinery scaled to their annual production of some 9,000 gallons, harvesting and crushing their 60 acres of sorghum in the field, with a tractor-drawn contraption assembled from a corn harvester, a concrete mixer and a thousand-gallon tank. Inside the cooking shed, clouds of vapor rise from a steam-heated pan the size of a swimming pool; a labyrinth of metal fins channel the hot syrup back and forth as it runs down the pan’s gentle incline. When it reaches the bottom, the syrup is sparkling brown and clings to a chilled spoon. The Houston family’s sorghum, by contrast, is nearly black and, on a cool day, solid enough to sit on the tines of a fork.

“There’s really no set way to make sorghum,” said Guenther, for whom the only ideal is a “clean” taste. “Nobody is doing it exactly alike.”

Among sorghum-making families, the younger generations participate to the extent their age allows, with the smallest skimming the boiling syrup with long-handled strainers. The old men keep watch: They issue directions, judge when the pan is cooked and, perhaps most important, share what Gerald McEntire calls “the story.” At the McEntire gathering in Old Fort, Hemphill told bystanders about one year’s memorable sorghum harvest at his farm, which was built by his great-great grandfather in 1846. “My wife and I went in about five o’clock in the morning, and about five o’clock the next morning we were still at it,” Hemphill recalled. “When everything is going good, I just can’t find a stopping place. I’d rather make sorghum than eat when I’m hungry.”

Muddy Pond sorghum syrup, $7 per pint at muddypondsorghum.net

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The cocktail scene in Cape Town is at the moment obsessed with botanicals: herbs, roots, and shoots. While drinks using fynbos, a family of floral plants native to western South Africa, are the way to go truly local, this variation of the mojito uses the more universally found and similarly flavored rose water (and rose petals as garnish). It’s from the Vista Bar & Lounge at the One&Only; Cape Town hotel, named for its breathtaking view of nearby Table Mountain.

MAKES 1 COCKTAIL

• 2 cups Demerara sugar
• ½ cup rose water
• ¾ oz. fresh lime juice
• ½ oz. rose syrup
• 1 cup mint leaves, plus more
• 3 oz. light rum
• 1 oz. fresh pink grapefruit juice
• Rose petals, to garnish

Simmer sugar, rose water, and ½ cup water in a 2-qt. saucepan over medium-high until sugar dissolves, 3–4 minutes; chill syrup. Muddle fresh lime juice, rose syrup, and mint leaves in a shaker. Add light rum, fresh pink grapefruit juice, and ice; shake and strain into a collins glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with a mint sprig and rose petals.

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An exotic blend of sherry, vermouth, fresh juices, and cider, La Gallega, from TK bar, is the perfect accompaniment to the crisp fall weather.

MAKES ONE COCKTAIL

• 2 cups honey
• FOR THE COCKTAIL:
• 2 oz. Tio Pepe Palomino Fino Sherry
• ½ oz. Casa Mariol Sweet Vermouth
• ½ oz. lemon juice
• ½ oz. honey syrup
• ¼ oz. grapefruit juice
• 6 turns black pepper
• 2 oz. hard cider
• grapefruit peel, for garnish

1. Make the honey syrup: Combine honey and 1 cup water in a 2-qt. saucepan over high heat; boil. Reduce heat to medium and cook 5 minutes. Chill until ready to use.

2. Make the cocktail: Combine sherry, vermouth, lemon juice, syrup, grapefruit juice, and pepper in a cocktail shaker filled with ice; shake vigorously and strain into a txacoli glass filled with ice. Top with cider and garnish with grapefruit peel.

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This four ingredient recipe, which we adapted from Breakfast, Lunch, Tea from Rose Bakery in Paris, is simple and delicious. Naturally gluten free, these cookies have a concentrated flavor, as ground almonds take the place of flour.

MAKES 35-40 COOKIES

• 3½ cups ground almonds
• 1¾ cups superfine sugar
• 3 eggs, separated
• 3 cups pine nuts

Preheat oven to 325°. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper; set aside. Combine almonds and sugar. In a separate bowl, lightly beat egg whites until they are frothy; add to almond and sugar mixture to form a paste. Shape 1 tbsp. paste into balls. Lightly beat egg yolks and put into a bowl; put pine nuts into a separate bowl. Roll balls into yolks, and then pine nuts. Refrigerate for 30 minutes; bake for 25 minutes until golden.

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This idea comes from Christine Buckley, an herbalist and food stylist in NYC. She suggests breaking the petals into very small pieces so you don’t have to decant the honey. The flecks or rose petals add texture and color and make it extra pretty. Use this any way you would use regular honey: in tea, on buttered toast, drizzled over fresh fruit or yogurt, or on anything else you’d like to add a floral sweetness to.

What You Will Need

• Wide-Mouth Glass Jar
• Wooden Spoon

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