Apples!

Our apple month, but we don't know that yet. 

Two friends, D and M, have kindly invited me over to harvest their one apple tree. No idea what type their apples are but they're small, red and a bit tart, mainly because the tree hasn't been pruned in probably five years. It turns out the tree yields a little over my body weight in apples and I arrive home with one massive suitcase filled plus several bags. What to do? Perhaps I should have thought of this before?

I scout around online for scratting and juicing equipment. At the volume we're looking at, electric kitchen-top juicers are out – the feeder is too small and in any case, our previous juicer, a Kenwood, split and leaked after only a year or so in use (just out of warranty – thank you, Kenwood). Semi-commercial scratter-and-press combos retail at well over £500 – this amount would keep us in Sandringham's Royal Fruit Farm Organic for a year, so that's a no.

On the internet, I discover that it's possible to scrat apples using just a top-and-side-loading garden shredder, and as ours is on its way out and not shredding an awful lot these days, I decide to risk it blowing up. I spend one entire Sunday cleaning the shredder while OH has sourced online instructions for a DIY apple press and has gone off to Wickes to buy wood. He sets up his workshop in the driveway, soon joined by P, our neighbour, who is a builder, Sunday-bored, and very intrigued.

While the boys scratch heads and saw and hammer, I cut up D's and M's apples and send them through the shredder. It works beautifully. The pomace ends up underneath on a clean potting tray and I fill it into an old pillow case. I ruin my left elbow squeezing and twisting the juice out of it, but I don't notice it until later. What I do know is that I've just made my first fresh apple juice, and I am hooked. The cider press in the driveway is taking shape and is road-tested on some pomace a few minutes later. The first pressing of some of our friends' apples yields 10 litres of which OH uses 5 litres for his first cider.

  

By now I've also discovered online how to make apple juice so that it looks good and keeps – the secret is Vitamin C powder and pasteurisation. I get an obscenely expensive jar of Vitamin C powder off Holland and Barretts and earlier in the year I'd sourced some beer-making equipment off a local Cheapcycler who also gave me a crate of fump bottles. They're not really called that; they're swingtop bottles, but “fump” is the sound they make when you open them so that's what I will always call them. I'd kept the crate in the attic but I really should have cleaned them properly there and then. When I finally inspect them, they're quite ripe. The guy had said he'd sterilised them all, and he may well have done so, but after 7 months in a boiling attic, the sterilising liquid has now turned brown and solid in places. It's a job cleaning them all, and the new bottle brush isn't quite up to the job. However, I do manage to clean enough bottles in near-boiling water for sterilising 5 litres of Vitamin-C'ed apple juice.

For this, I fill the bottles with the juice and plop them in the maslin pan with enough water and bring the water to the boil. With a thermometer that came with the Cheapcycle deal, I check frequently. The apple juice has to reach a temperature of 70 degrees Celsius and keep that for about 30 mins. It's terribly exciting, better than watching telly. Because the juice wasn't really filtered, there's all kinds of stuff floating to the top of the bottle. I dip my little finger in one of the bottles to taste it – if it's disgusting scummy scum, I'll have to skim it off but if it's just appley solids, they're staying. They turn out to be very tasty appley solids, but I've also now blown the pasteurisation of one of the bottles by contaminating it with the tip of my finger that's no doubt crawling with death-dealing bacteria. I will have to watch that bottle extra well.

Eventually, after more than half an hour, I decide to finish the bottling. Half an hour was probably overkill because I then read on another website that if you ratchet up the heat to 85 degrees, which I had done by accident, you can stop pasteurising after less than half an hour. But then again, I like to play safe, and while I've ingested some seriously deranged material in my time, I am afraid of botulism. Now that I know what it is, I am surprised it hasn't killed me yet. I close the swing tops and lift the bottles out of the hot water. Holding the hot bottle with oven gloves, I shake them well to make sure the appley solids don't block up the bottleneck, and then turn them upside down and plonk them back in their crate. They'll stay that way, sterilising the underside of the bottletops, until they've cooled.