When I was a kid we used to go to a neighbors annual “Square Dance and Cider Pressing” (yes, it was hokey but I was too young to know at the time. Hell, I liked my liesure suits too.). Anyhow, we just stuck the apples in the press thin (looks like a half varrel with some slats missing as i recall) and squeezed them. Someone may have mixed in extra ingredients, I dunno’, but what we got was “cider”.
Ok, now if you take appl juice and add cinnamon to it and it is ALWAYS cider after that then I could understand it. But as far as I can tell if you put apple juice you can doo all kinds of stuff to it and it is still called juice.
It’s really very simple. Cider is to apple juice as beer is to …er… hop juice. OK, not very helpful. How about: if you can still stand up after ten pints, it’s apple juice. If you’ve fallen down after eight, it’s cider.
[I drove my tractor through your haystack last night …]
Most people are insinuating that cider is alcoholic, and while this was the true meaning of it back in the day, most cider drunk is non-alcoholic (at least around here, anyway). Recently “hard cider” has become more popular, so you’ll fine a variety of brands in your local package store. Anyway, when dealing with non-alcoholic apple products, apple juice is what you get from the grocery store. It’s been filtered, pasteurized, etc etc. Apple cider is the raw pressings of the apples (and tastes about 50x better). Basically, apple cider is to jam as apple juice is to jelly.
I believe cider (the non-alcoholic kind, though “real” cider is good stuff also) includes the entire apple, pits, stem, peal and all, whereas apple juice has those things removed before it’s squeezed.
About a year ago I read the answer in an old USDA Yearbook (Crops, I think the title was, but don’t hold me to it). Cider contains the pectin (which makes it opaque), but the “apple juice” you buy in the store has had the pectin removed by the enzyme pectinase. Pectin is a type of complex carbohydrate nearly impossible for humans to digest. As such, it is considered to be a type of fiber, but it’s quite different from the type of fiber in, say, whole wheat.
The pasteurized/non-pasteurized theory doesn’t hold up. Most cider I see in the stores these days is pasteurized, though it wasn’t when Cecil wrote his column.
What we get when we throw apples in the press and bottle the results is cider. We don’t add anything to it. So I’m assuming that apple juice undergoes some manner of extra process (either chemical or mechanical, as in extra filtration) that makes it ‘juice.’
