At
primary school one of the stories in our Wide Range Readers was
Johnny Appleseed. As I remember, Johnny was presented as a jolly hobo
who wandered the length and breadth of America with bags of apple
seeds which he planted everywhere for no reason other than
benevolence. And this is how Johnny Appleseed is generally known. I
never gave him another thought until I read
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World by
Michael Pollan.
Pollan's
work shows how people and domesticated plants have formed mutually
beneficial relationships. His chosen plants are the apple – our
desire for sweetness, the tulip – for its beauty, marijuana –
which intoxicates us and the potato which nourishes us. Each of these
plants has thrived through selective breeding and genetic
engineering. It was a fascinating read which I'd recommend to anyone
who takes pleasure in growing – anything!
The
section I enjoyed the most was the one on our desire for sweetness
and apples. Pollan had a lot to say about Johnny Appleseed or, to
give him his true name, John Chapman. The tale I had from school was
over simplified. John Chapman was a fascinating man. But he didn't just wander around the United States planting seeds willy-nilly. He planted nurseries of apple saplings
and sold them to farmers. When a nursery was established he left it
in the hands of a manager and moved on, planted another nursery and
continued in this pattern. He made a decent living. Now an interesting fact
about apples is that they don't grow true from seed. Indeed, if you
were to take an apple and plant the several seeds that it contained,
each seedling would be entirely different from the others. And most
would be sour. Apple trees that produce sweet fruit may only be
propagated by grafting. So the vast majority of John Chapman's trees
would have produced sour fruit. So why did people buy them in such
large numbers? Because sour apples are just what is needed to produce
hard cider and applejack. Our reading book never mentioned that.
Which
brings me to my own recent experiment. I've been wanting Bert to make
a cider press for ages but he has yet to get round to it. So I was
rather pleased when a friend sent me a link to a method of producing
cider without using a press. I gathered my apples, a mixture of
Bramleys, crabs and dessert apples. Mostly Bramleys as they are what
I have at hand. They are not ideal for cider but it is just an experiment.
The
recipe uses a juicer instead of a press and we happen to have a
sturdy masticating juicer which makes it easier still.
Hard
Cider From Whole Apples
What
You’ll Need:
Apples, pears, or
crab apples (to be mixed with sweet apples.) About 15 lbs. of
fruit gets us about a gallon of juice. Must be fresh and
organic. Try to include some crab apples or tart apples with
your sweet ones for a better, more balanced flavour.
A juicer.
A chopping knife
and cutting board.
A large sieve and
a clean kitchen towel.
Demijohns, a
funnel, a siphon hose, rubber bungs and airlocks.
Sugar
Swing-top bottles
Method:
Wash
your fruit well with plain water.
Cut
your apples into quarters.
This is mostly just to check for bugs or other issues with the
apples. Discard or cut around any that have an infested core,
and cut out major bruises. You don’t need to worry about coring or
taking stems out– the juicer will do that for you.
Start
juicing! As
your juicer pitcher gets full, pour it through a funnel into a
sterilized demijohn.
Once you
have juiced all of your fruit, taste
the juice and add sugar.
At least a cup of sugar to a gallon of juice, more if you like sweet
cider. During the fermentation process, the yeast will eat the
sugar (both the fructose from the fruit and the added sugar) and
turn it into alcohol– so this step is both for flavour and alcohol
level. Those of you in the USA may not really need to add much
sugar, as most of the apples there tend to be really sweet.
You can add more sugar later if the brew is turning out too dry or
tart for your taste.
Put a rubber
stopper and an airlock on your demijohn, and let it sit for a week.
Rack
your cider–
siphon it into another sterilized demijohn, leaving the yeasty
sediment in the bottom of the first one, so you have a much cleaner
cider in the new demijohn. Taste it and see how it’s doing.
If it’s already tasting pretty dry, you can add some more sugar
before you put the airlock back on.
For a
sweet cider, bottle
after
a week. Three weeks or more makes a drier end product.
Fermenting it this long means that it won’t be very fizzy in the
end– but you can also add a little sugar just before bottling to
regain some carbonation. The next step is to bottle
your hard cider.
Use the siphon hose to fill swing-top
bottles. The
type of bottle is really important, since it lets out small amounts
of the pressure that builds up, so you don’t burst any bottles.
For
those of you in Northern Ireland all the specialist equipment needed
can be purchased at Hillstown Farm Shop near Ahoghill (and
Randalstown) or Nature's Way in Belfast.
