Lonelilly
Doin' it my way.
October 11, 2009 at 11:27 pm
filed under Kitchen, My kind of culture
This weekend wasn’t meant to be spent horsing around… I was fully prepared to dedicate it to putting the final touches on a new font and prepping for a site launch… but the weather was gorgeous and the rains are to start on Tuesday, announcing the true start of fall in the Pacific Northwest, so, needless to say, instead of working, we took advantage of the very last weekend of an Indian summer.
Apples are fruiting like crazy this year, and we’ve amassed quite a few. We’ve already canned 12 quarts of applesauce and have frozen apple butter, but we still have a TON of apples. I’ve really wanted to make cider, and we have a press Evan made years ago, but we’re missing the grater component to the whole apparatus. Yesterday we talked with our neighbors (the AWESOMEST people ever: in their 60s, former chefs, Welsch, curse worse than a sailor, make home brews, garden like crazy, and have 2 uber-hyper dogs….) over the fence as our dogs played and found out they had an apple grater that they were kind enough to loan for the day. So we started at about noon Saturday and worked well into the night under the stars crushing and pressing apples into juice to make hard cider. It’ll *hopefully* end up being about 6% alcohol (which is a pretty dry cider)–no one we’ve known has had much luck with a sweeter hard cider.
So here’s the process:
You pick as many apples as you can find. Like, a mountain of them.
Then, you put them through the apple grater/grinder/crusher so it makes something that can be pressed:
You put the pulp in the apple press:
And catch what comes out:
Juice! 8 gallons worth, to be exact! Drink it as-is, or, for adult cider, sterilize, use a hydrometer to get the specific gravity and gauge end-result alcohol content, add sugar if needed, and add yeast to start fermentation. Three weeks later, you’ve got a great hard cider you can bottle and drink!
Today was as cool, if not cooler than yesterday, as we took a little day trip over to eastern Washington (which is foreign no-man’s land to many–I’ve lived in the Pac NW 3 years now and have NEVER been over the mountains!). I’ll post pics in the next couple days–it was GORGEOUS!!! I think I need a ranch out there someday–it feels like a true Wild West: large vistas, lots of pine, horses, rolling hills, dry grasses… I want to be a cowgirl.
Here’s a glimpse of Winthrop, WA, a cute little tourist town and our destination for the day.
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