I moved house earlier this year, and have acquired as a result a number of mature fruit trees. Which is obviously lovely. But one has produced a bumper crop of Bramley cooking apples - ie apples you can’t eat raw as they’re too sour.
I’ve got loads. What can I do with them? We don’t really eat desserts, so pies and crumbles are out. I like apple sauce with pork, but there’s way too many apples for that habit. What else can I do with them? Any good way to preserve them?
Maybe a chutney? All apple or with raisins, rhubarb etc.? Will definitely preserve and should go with a fairly wide range of dishes (more so than apple sauce, anyhow).
You could also do apple vinegar which I think is just apples plus water plus time, but may come out too sharp with cooking apples (and you’d have to really like apple vinegar).
One other alternative is that you sell or trade your surplus - if there’s any danger of a village fete or church fair etc, make up a big batch of apple sauce and shift it that way. Or hand out to your new neighbours as a way of saying hello.
I like to peel, core, and chop apples and fill a crockpot. Start it on low when I go to bed and have warm applesauce for breakfast, then a side of cold applesauce for lunches and dinners.
What about dehydrating? Peel, core, and slice rounds. Dehydrate and eat.
Have any neighbors with horses? The apple orchard we live near saves their pick-outs (blemished apples) and we give them to our horses as treats.
We have a tree that produces very tart apples. My gf won’t eat them, but I love them.
There is a tradition in Persian cuisine for savory meat stews made with very tart (often not-yet-ripe) fruits. Apples aren’t really a thing in Persian food, but I’ll bet you could adapt an equivalent recipe.
Here are two.
I have ceramic apple bakers. Core an apple, place in a baker, stuff core with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon. Bake.
Not much help with the current bushels, but going forward… Fruit trees require annual maintenance pruning for optimum production - the former owners might not have kept up, and the apples trees may have ‘overset’ - the resulting abundance can be a nuisance, as well as bad for the trees… Thinning Your Fruit Trees - Cummins Nursery - Fruit Trees, Scions, and Rootstocks for Apples, Pears, Cherries, Plums, Peaches, and Nectarines.
I do love Persian cuisine (all forms of Middle eastern/North African in fact). I often make tagines with dried fruits. Do you think the apple might disintegrate? Maybe if I dried it as per kayaker’s suggestion
Thank you! I’m just starting to turn my attention to the garden as I’ve been decorating for the past few months. I have a large beautiful cherry tree which hasn’t fruited at all, which needs investigating. I have lots of plums and other apples coming on, but those trees certainly need pruning as the branches look like they might snap. Two small pear trees with no fruit too.
Our neighbors’ apple orchards are pruned regularly. It’s pretty amazing, they have 30 year old trees that are no more than ten feet tall. When they are harvesting apples they use short stepladders.
Sell them just as apples. Your homemade apple sauce may not meet health regulations; I don’t mean that it may not be perfectly safe, but that you may not be able to prove that it is to the satisfaction of your Department of Health. (This may depend on the state; and/or the specific village shindig may not care.)
You may have some time to deal with them; most apples keep for some time, though it depends on variety.
They’re probably on dwarfing rootstock. Pruning’s only part of it.
I’d dry them, or maybe make apple butter that you use like preserves.
If you’ve got homebrewing equipment, you could make cider out of them, I’ll bet.
We have a Bramley (its name is Bramley Stoker). This particular apple goes to mush very easily when it’s cooked, so it’s ideal for applesauce. There are a lot of recipes out there for making bread or muffins with applesauce as the liquid / sweetener. Personally, I love pies and crumbles, so that’s where ours go.
We do give most of them away: the apples are huge and the tree (which I prune and thin annually) is still very productive.
Put a small sign out by your road. You’ll sell all of them.
I just stopped at a farm stand. To get a watermelon.
They had a sign asking for apples. Apparently they are scarce this year, down here.
My apple trees are the Enterprise variety. It’s kinda a finicky tree. Sometimes it over produces other times it gives just a bare crop. I think will have some this year. It looks good if I can keep deer away.
Yeah, ain’t really no such thing as a too-tart eating apple as far as I’m concerned. If I lived near the OP I’d happily help with the surplus!
To be fair, I do live in Cider country - Herefordshire (England).
We used to have a big apple tree in our yard. It sadly died after a particularly hard winter, but in the early years of us living here, it produced hundreds of apples each season. I made 10 gallons of hard cider out of the apples one year, which turned out really well.
I used a heavy-duty juicer to juice the apples. Since they were a bit tart and the specific gravity (a reading that shows sugar content and therefore potential alcohol content) was on the low side, I added brown sugar to get the eventual alcohol content to around 6%. You can use the natural yeast on the apples to ferment, but the type of yeast can affect the flavor a lot, or so I heard, so I used a specific cider yeast I got from a beer-making supply store.
Finally, I added a little sugar just before bottling to do a secondary fermentation and make a sparkling cider. It was a fun project, and I enjoyed the fermented fruits of my labor that winter!
What about apple muffins for a quick breakfast? I know you mentioned apples with pork, what about a pork stew?