Archive for the ‘Apples’ Category

I’m back. Not surprisingly, Normandy was quite the beautiful adventure. I was there to educate my palate, learn some methodology in cider and calvados production, and most importantly to glean from their centuries-old apple food culture. I live in a place of copious amounts of largely wasted urban apples, with a brand-newly emerging scene surrounding how to save them and what to do with them. Thankfully the Normands already have much of this figured out.

I stayed right on the cider route in the Pays d’Auge. I visited many producers, who each make a mind-numbing array of products. A producer would typically make a pasteurized apple juice, a couple different ciders, a poire [sparkling pear cider], a pommeau [blend of calvados and apple must], and a long lineup of calvados of different ages, ranging from 2 years to 40+ years old, cider vinegar, and often a few other creations. Some produced for up to 3 appelations: Calvados AOC, Calvados Pays d’Auge AOC, and Donfrontais AOC – and would then have calvados made differently according to each set of appellation rules. I also had the good fortune of staying on an apple farm that used to be a producer, but now grows fruit for domaine Huet in Cambremer.

A few myths were dispelled. The biggest is harvest method. I’ve often heard not to make cider or apple wine from wind falls. The french have machines that shake the shit out of the tree to make all the fruit fall, then they blow them into a row with a giant leaf blower thing on a tractor, then broom them up with another tractor attachment. All the while any apples that had fallen and were rotting or busted with bugs, etc – all go with the good ones. They then wash and do a triage – thank God for that. It made me grateful we are at a scale at home that easily allows hand-picking and choosing only the best fruit. Seems like a preferable approach. Their harvest also spans September to December, so often the machinery is shared amongst producers, as they have so bloody long to get the job done compared to most type of fruit harvesting where time is of the essence.

The fruit is then sorted by type, broadly speaking into sweet, acid, and bitter categories and crushed and pressed together as such. They then blend afterwards to get to a product they’re looking for. The variability is huge from vintage to vintage. They may or may not get fruit from the same growers each year. Some apple varieties may or may not have done as well as a previous year. Harvest timing may not have been the same – didn’t see any refractometers micro-managing sugar content.  Leaves a lot of quality control in the hands of the cider maker. Another myth that was dispelled for me was apple dropping as an indicator of when to harvest. The orchard I stayed on had fruit all over the ground, yet they said they were still 8 days or so out from harvest. Perhaps that’s when the harvest machines were booked. Most people I know start to freak out about harvest the moment an apple hits the ground. This year, I’m trying my hand at being patient on my tree, collecting windfalls and refrigerating them, but otherwise leaving the apples up: better flavor, more sugar.

Another piece of variability between producers was use of oak. Oak is decidedly important in the calvados equation, making the difference between an apple eau-de-vie and something that they could call calvados. Some used new french oak [has to be french to meet appelation requirements] for a year or two, then aged in huge old oak casks for decades. One producer I visited simply puts the calvados in huge oak barrels [oldest one I saw was from 1792] which puts a decidedly less oaky stamp on their products. Whether that’s good or bad is a matter of personal preference.

Among many, many other things, I left there with a flow-chart of products I would now like to make with my apple must, as they do. The two products I fell hardest for were pommeau, a blend of apple must and calvados yielding a fruity, semi-sweet, 17% alcohol piece of deliciousness, and the plain-old pasteurized apple juice. A properly blended apple juice can be intensely complex like a nice white wine can be, such a pleasure compared to what we’re used to out of a box. I’m also keen to have a go at bottling some fermenting must to enjoy some hard cider – which generally has an assertive fermenty stink that certainly isn’t for everyone, but if super cold can be refreshing like a cold beer, when well made.

Apple blossom. It’s become a time of year that gets me excited for things to come, and wanting to slow time down to be able to enjoy the beauty of it all. I suppose this is simply an outcome of being more connected to my food – seasonal treasures like this simply make life more enjoyable.

I now understand why folks in days past often built root cellars primarily for potatoes and apples. Apples are a provider of wealth. Our tree produces 200+ lbs a year. I’ve spent a few years taming the tree via pruning, so the fruit is getting less numerous, but larger and riper, yielding roughly the same amount by weight from year to year. It has not skipped a year, as you often hear apples do. It provides us with fresh fruit for months, 4-5 cases of apple wine, and various other by-products – including apple wood for smoking pork.

I’m a firm believer that apples deserve a prominent role in our northerly food culture – so much so that I’m headed to Normandy in September to immerse myself in an apple culture, to get ideas, education, and inspiration. Don’t have an apple tree? Don’t need one. Our city is so full of them that tonnes of fruit get put in the bin every year by owners frustrated with the mess of food. Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton is a genius organization trying to change that. This year is doubly exciting as they get further geared up with a crusher and press for volunteer use – how cool is that!?!? I see cider in many an Edmontonian’s future.

Red Sparkle Apple (the beginning of 2011 wine vintage)

Saskatoon

Wild Strawberry

Red Currant

Strawberry - non-wild variety

Ps. This is my 600th post, wordpress tells me.

Turns out an apple wine updates is overdue.

I made apple wine from 5 different trees this year. We had actually harvested from 7, but two were held for a time in the not-yet-very-cold-cellar and those apples were a mess in the crush/press stage – just wouldn’t release their juice for some reason. Of the 5 batches, 1 was outstanding, 1 was a dramatic failure, and the others came in somewhere in between. All were made in the same way with the same yeasts, so apparently I’m in the process of discovering which apples make superior wine. I have one batch on oak at the moment, but most are unoaked this year as they’re so fruit-forward – the best one of candy-like, high-toned fuzzy peach and grapefruit.

All of the carboys are well done their alcoholic fermentation, and different than last year, no malolactic fermentation seems to have taken hold. I either missed observing it, or I’m right and the cellar was so cold that the wine was cold-stabilized before it could do its thing. I’m only bottling a short-term supply and bulk aging the rest, in case the wine decides to have an MLF party in the summer when the cellar warms up a bit. It’s currently 4C – a tad cold for my liking for the long term aging of posh french reds, but certainly lovely for storing fresh flavors in apple wines.

Good quality apple wine is vastly underrated. Now that I’m set up for it, my marginal cost per bottle of wine is under $0.25.  Free fruit abounds in the city. And I know, I know, crappy home-made wine isn’t even worth that, perhaps – but this stuff isn’t crappy, I assure you. Ridiculously cheap, local, tasty wine – one of the fronts to fight towards a cool regional food scene.

Normally I tackle this when the first hints of mild weather hit in February, but having had my nose buried in seed catalogs for a while, it was nice to get out in the garden buried in snow [see below] and do a job that needed doing for the coming growing season. My objective with my apple is to clear out the center, remove any waterspouts, truncate the branches that are getting too long, and clean up any wood that is overcrowding, overlapping, or otherwise offending a neighboring branch. The problem is, I find pruning akin to harvesting berries – I get into a zone of obsession. Just a little bit more. Just one more. Until there’s a serious pile of branches on the ground.

My second problem is that I then am unmotivated to clean up the mess. I think today was the first day ever that I actually cut up the wood the day I pruned, and stacked it neatly, ready for future use. Having run very short on apple wood to smoke with, I was very pleased to stack up a good pile of sticks that should last me the next year or more when smoking bacon, jerky, etc.

An advantage to pruning this year: were I to have fallen off my ladder, I would have fallen into 3′ of fluffy snow.

Oh, happiness. I’ve been keeping a loose eye on the bubbling of my apple wine carboys [a not-so-modest 9 carboys, or ~20 cases. I'm sharing with folks, honest], but hadn’t noticed them dropping clear until today. What does that mean? The yeast is done doing its thing – and no longer is creating turbulence in the solution. What does that really mean? It’s drinkable. I’m overjoyed. I ran out of last year’s far too quickly.

A few notes about this vintage. I kept all batches on-sediment/pulp rather than racking the clear juice the day after. Last year I took the clear juice hoping for a fruity approach – but the unavoidable MLF [malo-lactic fermentation] yielded a more funky/complex  [then oaked] wine, so keeping the lees involved for this style seemed to make good winemaking sense. Also may provide nutrients for the yeast. I’m finding this vintage looks darker in color, perhaps because of it. Last year’s looked almost this dark – but only after being oaked. It has a little young-lees-stink which I’m finding is normal and goes away with age & air. The wine in the photo is pre-MLF and pre-oak. It’s got notes of apricot, caramel [odd, pre-oak], apple, and light peach?

Me and my various crews crushed and pressed apples from 5 trees, in 5 yards around the city – so I have quite a few batches, 2 being lovely crabapple wines, which I intend on blending this year to achieve the best possible wine I can. Although I can’t wait to blend, I’m more excited to simply start enjoying hyper-terroir driven wine with and in my daily cooking again. Especially with the bounty of pork and goat cheese around lately. Life is good.

The forecast tonight? -4C!?! The ‘big white combine‘, as farmer-friend Andreas puts it, cometh. It was go-time in our yard today. We started with harvesting the tomatoes [nearly all green], then the fall squashes, any remaining summer squashes, the cucumbers, celery, celeriac, the significant beet crop, onions, shallots, pole beans, bush beans of many types – and a couple hundred pounds of Red Sparkle apples from our tree. The afternoon was spent crushing and pressing the apples to get the 2010 vintage of Red Sparkle apple wine underway. Then cleanup and stowing away and trimming and sorting of all the produce. I can recall few times that I’ve been this tired.

Tomorrow morning, plants will die.

Soon enough, hardy crops like leeks, potatoes, carrots, chard, kale, belgian endive, rutabaga, parsnip, etc will need to come up too – but for now, this first push of harvest has taken a weight off my shoulders. It was the first big indicator, looking around the empty sections of my previously full-to-the-brim garden, that the fall craziness will soon slow, and winter will bring rest.

I’d promised a video peek at how I’ve been making lovely apple wine from urban yard waste. Fortunately, Kristeva and Jessica volunteered to give me a hand, and they quickly jumped in and took over, allowing me to shoot a good portion of the process. If you have any questions about the details, ask in the comments.  [And pardon the profanity, but I just couldn't resist using this song. ]

So what could one possibly do with 300-400lbs of apples from your yard – or perhaps your neighbor’s yard?! How much apple sauce or apple pie does one need? I propose the following solution: wine. My current estimate is that it takes about an hour to convert 100 lbs of apples into a carboy of juice – or about 2 cases of finished wine. So Saturday: 4 hrs of crush and press, roughly 4 finished carboys of wine, which will end up yielding about 10 cases of wine, or 120 bottles. Time well spent.

To take it a step further into economics-land, which I always tend to do, it’s important to note that results so far have been as good or better than commercially available fruit wines. So say $20/bottle. We pay a lot of tax on wine in Alberta, so I’d have to pay  roughly $20 to meet or beat the quality I’m producing. Assuming I’m correct on that estimate, 120 bottles holds a value of roughly $2400. Since the fruit was free - not only free but somebody’s problem that they were raking and putting in the trash to get hauled off – the rate of return on input costs, even time included, is rather high, I’d say. [Add to that, the crusher/press  setup I use is no excuse for barrier to entry - it's a home-made deal that anybody with some initiative could slap together. I posted about it last year.]

I had some great help this year on crush day, and was able to take some good video as things played out. So rather than get into ‘how-to’, I’ll defer to the soon-to-be-posted video for you to have a look at how we do it. Perhaps you too could be making apple wine soon. No apples? No problem. Go pick with these folks to get hooked up with fruit that others need picked, and help out a charity while you’re at it. I love win-win-win-win-win stuff.

Good things come to those who ask. This spring, I was picking up some kijiji-found-cinder-blocks, and the folks who had the blocks happened to have inherited a city lot with an INSANE amount of fruit trees on it. So I asked. And today I received. A few hundred pounds of apples, which dented about 3/4 of one of their trees – and they have 6+ in their backyard. And they have raspberries, nanking cherries, saskatoons, evans cherries, and other fruits in significant quantity. Operation Fruit Rescue Edmonton will need to pay them a visit.

Yes, some will be applesauce, some will be fruit for desserts, and some out of hand. But the vast, vast majority are about to meet their fate in my crusher and press setup – soon to be fermenting away into what appears may be a lovely white wine. The aromatics on this varietal, whatever it is, is reminiscent of gewurztraminer, but lacks acidity. Fortunately, when one has that many trees, some with two apples per, thanks to grafting, finding an acidic apple to pick up the slack is facile.

I’ve been waiting for this time of year for a long time. Last year’s apple wine was a tremendous success, and I ran out of my 3 cases quickly. Only a half case remains stashed in an out-of-the-way bin in my wine cellar for future years to track its aging potential. But round one of 2010 has begun. And I’ve got 2 other locations to pick at yet – then my own. I only have 10 carboys, I may have to go buy more.

So let this be the first but not last time of the harvest that I say: Ask thy neighbor, and put all that fruit to some good use. Please.