Good Year For Apples
It’s been a good year for apples - at least, it has if my handful of trees are anything to go by. The gales last weekend brought down bucketloads of ripe fruit, which does bring the proud apple tree owner a few problems in its own right.
How do you deal with this sudden bonanza of delicious fruit?
The domestic food-dehydrator (£35 from Amazon) has been working in overdrive and we’ve got jars full of desiccated, leathery but delicious apple rings to use in future puddings, stews, apple sauces and so on, or even to eat on their own. Simply core and peel your apples, thinly slice, and dunk into a mix of lemon juice and a little sugar - then place on a rack in the device to dry for eight or none hours.
This year I’ve been trying a variation on this theme by making what is known as apple leather - which is basically a slow-dried apple puree placed on kitchen parchment paper in the same magical appliance. The food-dehydrator might make a bit of a humming noise all day, but it only uses a tiny amount of power to run and it will fill your entire house with the fruity autumnal scent of apples.
Apple fruit leather - delicious lightweight stuff to take on a country hike
Blend a mix of fruit, sugar and lemon juice until smooth. Line the food dehydrator fruit tray with parchment paper. Spread the fruit mixture evenly across the fruit dehydrator tray. Put on the lid and set the device to 60C. You can add things like a little touch of cinnamon if you wish - and a chunk the resulting “leather” will be your very best snacking friend on a long winter’s walk.
It’ll keep for months in a sealed plastic container in the fridge and you can use small chunks of it when you’re cooking apple sauce or fruity curries or making crumbles in the long months ahead.
You could, of course, simply make the puree then bung it into a freezer for use later. What I’ve done in the past is to cook down a homemade puree as far as I can so that it is more dense than the stuff you’d make as apple sauce for pork, for example. Then I’ve filled ice-cube trays with the stuff so that I could pop out a couple to help thicken and slightly sweeten, say, a nice winter pork stew or curry.
You can also pickle apples, which is something I love to do now that I have become addicted to the whole healthy concept of fermented foods. Slice your washed apples into into thick batons about 1/2-inch thick by 1 1/2 inches long, and place in medium bowl. Add salt, cayenne and turmeric and mix well.
Warm a tablespoon of some flavour free oil in a small frying pan over medium heat, put in a couple of teaspoonfuls of mustards seeds and cook until they begin to pop - add chopped garlic and ginger and fry for just a minute or two, throw in some dry spices like ground turmeric, ground fenugreek, red chilly powder and asafoetida - then pour in a cup of white wine vinegar, half that amount of water, some sugar and salt and bring to the boil. After a couple of minutes, take off the heat, allow to cool for a just five minutes or so, then pour all over your apple batons. When finally cool place the mix into sterilised jars.
Some might say: what’s the point in doing all this when we can buy fresh apples 365 days a year? To which I’d reply that all the above methods of preserving your apple glut result in truly delicious morsels - and also I’d ask: how can apples that have travelled thousands of miles be fresh?
If you do not have a glut of your own apples this autumn, then I would urge you to seek out and buy excellent apples sold by local growers, which are no dearer than their supermarket cousins.
The folk who run Charlton Orchards near Taunton stick rigidly to their philosophy that no eating apple should be picked before it is ripe (as is often the case with fruit imported from the Southern Hemisphere).
“To maximise the flavour of the fruit, it needs to be on the tree until the starches are converted to fruit sugars,” Charlton Orchards’ Duncan Small once told me. “If you pick too early, the proportion of starch to sugar is much higher – the apple will keep better, but you won’t get the flavour.
“It is possible to store an apple to eat in May, but you’d need to pick really early and it would never have the proper flavour. Also, it would be much harder.”
As for the different varieties, Duncan says: “We’re very open minded – its not whether its an old or a new variety that interests us – it’s simply whether it’s good or not. We’re continually trying varieties and if we find one with a particularly good flavour, we’ll grow more.”
Duncan added: “Cox’s orange pippin is the most popular English apple – which is not really surprising. Ashmead’s Kernel is an excellent late apple which is sold in December time for Christmas. It is an old fashioned russet, but it’s got an exceptionally well developed flavour – sweet, but slightly acidic, and slightly spicy.
“Suntan is a cross between the Coxes orange pippin and an ancient variety called Court Pendu Plat. It is like a very intensively flavoured Cox – slightly more acidic – firm but deeply flavoured and it bakes beautifully.
“Of the new varieties, red pippin is an excellent variety - very aromatic with a good fruit-acid balance. It has a very full flavour, but the texture is more ‘modern’ – more crunchy, a cleaner crunch.
“Another nice modern apple we’re picking this weekend is Falstaff – a big yellowy pink apple with a dimpled skin. It’s not too acidic, very sweet, very crunchy and juicy. It is very popular at farmers’ markets where people can have a tasting…”
Charlton Orchards can be contacted on 01823 412959 or you can visit their website on www.charltonorchards.com
When all is said and done there is nothing - really nothing - quite like the raw crunch of a sweet and juicy apple straight from the tree. There are, however, many other ways of eating raw apples than simply as a fruit on its own. One of my favourites is to use them in various salads. Most famously they are added to celery for the classic Waldorf salad which comes from the USA where they are also fond of incorporating apple in a blue cheese and mayonnaise salad. This is particularly good as a cold lunchtime dish at this slightly cooler time of year.
Apart from being delicious apples are, of course, incredibly good for you. Eating plenty of them is believed to lower blood cholesterol, improve bowel function, as well as reduce the risk of stroke, prostate cancer, type II diabetes and asthma.
Recent research from Finland indicates diets with the highest intake of apple phyto-nutrients were associated with a 46 percent reduction in the incidence of lung cancer. Findings also indicate that two apples a day reduced the damaging effects of cholesterol.
So, why not grab some of that doctor-avoiding advice right now while going is good and consume as many fresh apples as you can…
