Sunday, September 30, 2012

The Day of the Apple Cometh!

Yesterday was the harvest of the fruit of my recent labors: APPLE DAY!!  Even though Herself went off to Garage Sales as usual, I started early, waking the kids up, wanting their help.  I got them slicing and peeling apples while I made the crust for an apple pie.  They were sure they were dreaming but it was fun to see daddy doing something they had never seen him do before.  We had a LOT of fun and there was a LOT of silliness involved!  Someone decided that it was good luck to put an apple under your hat on Apple Day, so we all had stocking caps with apples underneath.  After the pie was in the oven I went out to the butcher shop and ran about 6 apples through the meat grinder and made applesauce for breakfast!  Then we ate a bunch of cinnamon buttery rolls made out of extra pie crust (like my mom gave me when I was a kid; I liked them best raw...) with our breakfast applesauce.

But the main event was to make APPLE CIDER!  I had spent nearly every waking moment for the last two weeks making a cider press in preparation for this day.  Finally it is done and we couldn't wait to get started.

Here we soak the apples before we cut the bad spots and worms out.  Seeds and stems go in the grinder as well.  My cider-mentor Dan Kauffman told me 2 tart apples for every sweet one, and the more variety the better.
Apple cutting crew!  Don't come over to MY house to see what's going on unless you're willing to be put to work!





Here is a shot of my little set up in the butcher shop.  Starts right and moves left.  We started with about 6 bushel boxes of apples. It goes from box to tub, to cutting table, to grinder to pulp bucket, to press bucket to cider bucket.





Meat grinder making apple pulp.  Notice the cheese cloth that makes it so we can transfer pulp to oak press bucket.  The pulp stays in the cheese cloth and works like a big coffee filter.

The cider press in action!  Yay! Turn the crank and the juice comes out and runs out the end of the copper pan.  I just cranked it till I couldn't anymore and came back to it a minute later and it was easy to turn again. It compacts it to about half the size of the unpressed pulp after squeezing the juice out.

 Close up of the cider press screw.

Yum! Foamy fresh cider!  Nothing better!
Siphoning off into bottles.

After a while we started using this great antique sausage stuffer/cider press.  Next year I will use them both.  I couldn't really keep up with the electric grinder. This old press worked really pretty well, but you couldn't do as much at a time with it.  If that's all I had, I would have got way behind. 

This the "remains" of 6 bushel boxes of apples!  Who knew there was so much air in apples?  I figured that we got about 10 gallons of cider from those 6 bushels.  Hard to tell exactly; I can't tell how much we drank during the process


She said we ate so many apples they were coming out of her nose and ears!!!
This was one of my favorite parts!  Watching my hogs (that weren't even hungry) utterly destroy about 100# of pulp!  Happy hogs make great ham! They made absolute pigs out of themselves...

It was a great project; not counting set up time (and building the press, of course) it took about 4 hours to press 6 bushels and clean up.  At 16.00 per bushel, it makes pretty expensive cider, but you can't buy this stuff at Walmart (nor anywhere else; it's like store bought tomatoes vs HomeGrown), and I'm always looking for fun stuff that I can do with my family that doesn't involve TV or leaving my farm.  I think this was a great experience and can't wait to do again next year.  If you have any apple trees or know of anybody that does and doesn't do anything with them; let me know! We will come and pick!!  I have planted 4 of my own trees, but have yet to get any fruit from them.