This time of year is all about preserving the harvest, and some of that is the making of chutneys and pickles. I have stocked up on supplies of malt vinegar, something that the village shops run out of quickly at this time of year as others are doing the same, but this made me consider making our own vinegar, and I have been tuning into various mutterings over vinegar making on the net – in particular Andrea at Casalinho wrote a very interesting post on making vinegar from fruit scraps.
However, we have plenty of apples – not so many as in other years, but plenty, and more than we have freezer space, so the obvious thing to do is make our own cider vinegar…and for that we need cider, and before that we need apple juice.
We freeze and thaw the apples before pressing them (yes I know I said we had no freezer space – this space is already prebooked, we just borrowed it for a couple of days) as it makes crushing and pressing them so much easier. Then the crushed apples are pressed.
Interestingly the first juice is white and cloudy – it goes orange as it oxidises, but as the pressing continues you get clearer juice. It’s all delicious.
It’ been a while since we pressed our own apples, and today we have been kicking ourselves as the juice was so lovely. How much makes it as far as vinegar remains to be be seen – we have already drunk a lot just as juice, and saved more back for that… then I might just drink the cider. Hopefully we will get as far as making our own cider vinegar too.
Loving your apple press, and the tip to freeze and thaw the apples is a goodie I’d not heard before.
look so good the apple crush