Apples

last 1/3 of the apples

Apples drying in the oven

  A friend has been giving me some of her windfall apples.   This is the third batch I am processing.  I dry a lot and make apple sauce with the waste.   The whole process is very fast and easy and something almost anyone could do.  I admit I have one tool that really helps, the apple peeler/corer, but it is cheap to buy and readily available to find in stores.

Close up of the tool

Apple sauce will come out of this, trust me

Apples ready for use

For drying I gave up using a dehydrator and switched to the oven a couple of years ago because the dehydrator could not handle the volume I was trying to dry.   I set the oven at 65 degrees C and dry them for about 8 to 24 hours.  It works very well and allows me to produce a lot of dried apples at once.

The skin, cores and any other waste I put into a pot and make apple sauce with it.   Using the Victoria food mill it is a very easy process.   The final left over pulp ends up being fed to the chickens.

The apple corer is an amazing piece of 19th century technology.   I processed about 80 apples in 30 minutes.   Fast and efficient.   The tool leaves with apple rings ready for drying.

Some the apple sauce is going to get mixed with either blueberry, strawberry or cranberry puree and made into fruit leather.   Turns out we really do not eat a lot of apple sauce.

Sheila is also making a pie and a crisp with the apples.