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cwc, my husband showed me the photos you sent him. wow! Football, indeed. Looks like a heavyweight defensive player fell on it. I've never seen anything like that. And I'm glad you did not lose much syrup and can repackage it for long-term storage. Thanks for posting the Food and Wine link. I'm going to make the maple-apple upside down cake for sure, and maybe try the squash/pumpkin soup.
Skeptic, that's the way we seal jars when we initially make the syrup. We boil the sap that comes out of the tree(s), to 219.5*, which is now syrup, not sap. To re-package the syrup, heat the syrup up to 190*; you do not need to completely re-boil it, just get it up to around 190. Then pour it into clean glass jars, cap them, and they self-seal. You can hear the lid "pop" and then feel that the lid has lost it's flexibility if you poke it. It's the same process of canning, with a water bath or pressure cooker -- the lid is sealed. These sealed jars do not need to be refrigerated; once opened, however, they do have to be kept in the refrigerator. Sometimes we need to transfer syrup from gallon jugs into different containers (usually small, fancy bottles for wedding favors) so we use the same process - heat the syrup to 190*, pour into clean (sterilized in boiling water) jars, and cap.
Also, if you ever find mold growing on an opened container of syrup, you can scrape the mold off, toss it, and reheat the syrup to 219.5 (yes, 219.5 is correct if you have removed mold) and put it in a clean glass container and cap it. We've seen this happen a couple of times. Supposedly, the syrup container did not seal completely or was not refrigerated. Experts say the mold is actually growing in the water/moisture that was in the original container, not growing in the syrup which has a high sugar content.
I'm not sure how much heat a plastic funnel can manage, so to be safe, I guess you probably should use metal not plastic. We use metal at the sugarhouse. It is an easy process -- the hardest part is waiting for the syrup to come up to temperature -- it takes a while.
