Yesterday we tackled the 8 bushels of apples that Miguel snagged from one of our farmers about a week ago. These were prime #1 apples and a real treat to get.
We started off by the pool trying to press some apple juice. It worked ok but eventually Miguel and I moved the press back outside and tied it to the front of the Gator again like we did last time. This worked much better and it’s the way to do it in the future. I’d tried to do it without the Gator because it was raining and cold outside but eventually I figured a way to get the Gator positioned out of the rain so we could work in comfort.
We processed about 6 bushels of apples into various items leaving about 2.5 bushels to go to apple sauce. We ended up with about 4 gallons of apple juice from yesterday’s work. Our project today, after Christmas at Grandma’s, is to turn the rest of the apples into applesauce, and then can everything and get it put away. It sounds like the family may stay at Grandma’s tonight so it will be a solo event in the kitchen tonight. The only hard part of doing the apple sauce is peeling and coring all the apples. We have two cool old time apple peelers that work well, however it still takes a while to do all the work. No worries, though, after feeding today, it’ll be a pleasure to spend some time in the kitchen with some music and a simple chore.
After everything is peeled and cored, it’s just cooking things down in our large stock pot, and then blending with the immersion blender. Instant apple sauce. Then just a quick batch of canning and clean up.