Its been a little thin here this
summer, there is always another thing on the list ahead of blogging.
One of those things is now dealing with the glut of apples and pears
on our trees just now becoming ready for picking and deciding what to
do with it all. Having always wanted to try making cider but not sure
how to effectively crush large volumes of fruit ready for pressing I
recently came up with a quick and easy method of doing just that.
Use the wood chipper! Yes, thats right
give that chipper a good clean out, remove the screen, place a polly
feed bag over the outlet and dump a ½ bushel of fruit in the
top and 15 seconds later you have a bag of pulp ready to be pressed,
my press takes two such bags per pressing and yeilds between 2 and 3
gallons of juice.
So I now have several liters of Pear
and apple juice (suitably heated to kill the wild yeast) in the
fringe, an experimental gallon each of cider and perry bubbling away
in the corner AND some pear butter made from the squeezed pulp (waste
not want not) on the go in the slow cooker. Biggest problem is that
this was all done with a couple of bushels of early 'fallers' and I
already have 2 or 3 bushels of pears ripening in the basement, many,
many more on the tree and have not even started on the apples.
Given that I also want to make some
pear wine and only have enough equipment to make about 20 gallons in
total it looks like I will be once again giving away fruit to anyone
who drops by as we hate to see stuff go to waste and the chickens and
peacocks (who love fruit) are already overloaded with the left over
pulp. Apple pie anyone?
Oh, then there are the grapes which are
also loaded with fruit..........
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