I know, I know, they need to be trimmed. Right now. The closest tree is a Golden Delicious and the furthest is, I think, a Spitzenburg. These are some really prolific trees and we get a LOT of apples that don't keep very long. I've done a few things with them over the years: the ubiquitous applesauce, apple butter, dried apples, canned apple pie filling, fresh apple pies, eating apples. You get it. September first I love apples. At the end of October I hate apples. This year I decided to do something new by copying someone else.
I have this awesome neighbor that I want on my team in the event of a zombie apocalypse. She does everything from gardening to making cheese to making musical instruments to mushing a sled dog team while working full time and raising two boys. Where do these people come from? She also makes this really good hard cider and since I have all the stuff my dad had - Grolsch bottles and rubbers, 5-gallon glass bottle for fermenting - I decided to give it a whirl. The result, after two months of fermentation, was meh. I only added one pound of sugar per gallon of juice and the cider was DRY. I like it a lot sweeter. We'll try again next year.
Another thing I tried was apple cider vinegar. I put some of the apple bits left over from a day of juice-making into gallon-sized pickle jars. Then I filled them up the rest of the way with rain water, covered them with a couple pieces of sprigged muslin since I'd run out of cheesecloth and stuck the jars on a shelf. In December, most of the apple bits had sunk to the bottom of the jars, but the ones that were still floating had this yucky mold on them. I kinda freaked out and skimmed that mold off. I decided to see what would happen next and covered them back up and back on the shelf they went.
This is what happened.
Yesterday I checked them out. This jellyfish-looking stuff is THE MOTHER!!!! This is what makes vinegar. This is what you pay so much more for at the health food store. I must confess that I did the happy dance. And it wasn't pretty. Then I tasted my vinegar and calmed down. And decided to leave it on the shelf for a while longer. It's not quite vinegary enough yet.
If this works out, I'm so glad I'm gonna be on my zombie apocalypse team! Who knew it was so easy to make apple cider vinegar?
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