Apple Day: Picking, Pressing & Canning
One of our family traditions is our family’s annual “Apple Day” where my extended family all gathers to pick apples in the morning and then press the apples into fresh juice/cider in the afternoon. We love this time together and the fun seasonal activity of it – plus that we get to drink pure juice all year long afterwards!
We collect and pick apples from where ever we can find them. There’s only one rule: they have to be free.
Yep, frugality runs in the family.
Though to be honest, juicing apples doesn’t require pristine apples and we live in a part of the country where apples grow wild all over the place and every other house seems to have apple trees.
Many years we see tons go to waste, rotting beneath the trees we can see as we drive by.
Not this year, though. It wasn’t a good year for apples and we had our work cut out for us.
We called all the people we knew- and some we didn’t- searching for apples. We took small, scabby apples we would’ve tossed other years. And in the end…
We managed to find enough!
There are always enough jobs for everyone on apple day, besides just picking. We take all the apples to my stepfather’s house and after they are washed, they are put into this cool electric apple crusher.
That is one messy job. My daughter and I always come home smelling like apples and covered in juice!
Then they are funneled into the apple press. Be prepared to have apple pieces fall on your shoes.
Then the brawny men (We like to tell them that, because who wants to take this job, really? Though anyone can!) take shifts turning the handle and pressing down the crushed apples.
Apparently, the action was so intense in this picture, I couldn’t hold still long enough to take a clear picture.
As a side note, we’ve used an electric press the last few years but found it didn’t extract as much juice as good old man-power. What do you know.
The juice gets filtered as it comes out of the press. This is just the first of two, and sometimes three filterings. Oh, and you have to put a cup under that stream at least once to taste the super fresh juice (Or is it cider? We never know what to call it!).
Then the two large containers of juice are transported to my sister’s house.
They sit overnight and those of us who can (ha, get it? as in canning) meet the next day to put all the juice up in quart jars so they will be shelf stable.
We worked as a team boiling the juice, transferring it to jars, canning them in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes, and removing them.
And doing it over and over again all day.
But in the end we canned 148 jars of wonderful apple juice (Cider? Anyone know the difference?).
And had a great time and a great memory.
