Step 1: Wear gloves

A nice feature of this time of year is that you can sleep in and still be up for sunrise. When I went out at 7:00 Saturday morning to let the girls out, here is the view that greeted me as the sun rose over the corn field across the road.

October sunrise

On the other side, the grass was white with frost. It was 28°F, well below normal for mid-October.

Frosty field

Here’s a close up of the frost crystals. Winter’s coming.

Ice crystals on the grass and oak leaves

I mentioned in my last post that our red maples are very pretty this year. I put on my Wellies and went out for a close up.

Red maples living up to their name

We also have a sassafras tree that has turned a lovely reddish brown.

Sassafras

With autumn comes apples. If memory serves, we didn’t have many apples last year because a late frost killed most of the flowers. No flowers, no fruit. Thus, it has been two years since I made apple juice, a project I only take on when we have WAY more apples than we know what to do with. Two years ago was the first time I made apple juice, and I did a great deal of experimentation to perfect the process. I had the presence of mind to 1) type detailed notes and 2) put them where I could find them again.

It had been so long that I was surprised to see that the instructions began with “1. Wear gloves.” I always wear gloves with working with hot peppers, but apple juice? After we’d been at it awhile, I remembered that working with apple pulp for hours left my fingers tanned--not as in Malibu Barbie, but as in animal hide, tough, brown, and leathery. That’s why they call it tannin.

I asked Terry to deliver a couple of boxes of MacIntoshes to the downstairs patio. Here’s what he brought. We used the first two boxes in the foreground.

Terry's apple delivery

Jane took some of Terry’s apples home a few weeks ago and made the mistake of telling me that she found washing apples highly satisfying. Because Terry never sprayed the apples this year (because the hens were in the orchard), they have spots of mildew on the outside that scrubs right off with a clean nail brush. Then they look beautiful!

“Perhaps you’d like to come up Saturday and wash apples,” I suggested. And so she did, arriving at my house at 10:30. She began at the sink, but later switched to sitting at the table. My notes said to use 12 to 15 apples for each batch of juice. Mostly we used 15 because the apples were small. You can see the “before” apples in the box.

Jane washing apples

One of the apples Jane washed had a leaf stuck to it. When she took it off, she found a perfect imprint including the petiole (leaf stem). We hadn’t known before that apples need light to turn red. I expect Terry knew that. Also note how pretty the apple is after washing.

A leaf print, complete with stem (left), on a shiny washed apple

Once clean, I sliced around the core in four cuts. I removed most of the bad spots, although as the morning wore on, I became less particular about the tiny little fruit fly larva trails.

Slicing apple off the core

And then to the juicer. One of the reasons I like the MacIntosh is that they don’t brown as readily as other varieties, as you can tell by the color of the juice in this photo.

The juicer and juice before the foam has completely settled

My notes said to clean the screen of the juicer and prepare the next batch of apples before pouring the juice from the collection pitcher through a sieve into my 2-liter pitcher. This allows the juice to settle from the foam. As soon as the foam starts coming out, stop and throw out the rest, even though every fiber of your being knows there is some juice left in there. I also wrote down the Apple Juice Motto: Embrace the Waste.

Every two to three batches, I skimmed the juice in the 2-liter pitcher with the tea strainer that no longer has a handle (yes, I wrote that down), and poured it into my largest stock pot. After 9 batches (roughly 135 apples), the stock pot was full.

I brought the apple juice to a boil, skimming off all the stuff that rose to the top along the way. (“Rinse skimmer in a bowl of water.”)

Boiling apple juice

Finally, I used a 2-cup measuring cup to pour the hot juice through a jelly bag into the (washed) 2-liter pitcher, and into the jars from there. And even with all this skimming and straining, they will eventually develop flocky stuff in the bottom. The weather station in this photo shows that it is now 2:20.

The final filtration through a jelly bag

I put lids on the jars and processed them for 10 minutes in a canner. And here they are! So lovely.

Six lovely quarts of apple juice

Here is about 4 gallons of apple waste in a 5-gallon bucket. Embrace the waste.

Four gallons of waste for 1.5 gallons of juice

It was 3:00 when I finished. If I sold apple juice at the farmers market and wanted to pay myself my normal wage, I would have to charge $47.50 per jar. It is a labor of love. And as long as we are doing math, it takes 22.5 apples per quart.

On Sunday, I was upstairs chatting with Hilda about the chickens—most notably that I saw Carmella do the Squat of Maturity, so it shouldn’t be long before she starts laying—when Hilda said, “I should learn to make apple juice.”

“Are you saying you’d like to help?” And so she washed apples for me, and we turned out six more jars of juice. I made 10 batches on Sunday, though, so I could have a little leftover for immediate consumption. It is excellent hot.