That excellent question comes from reader Troy. The answer is: I don’t know. Sure, there are a few cider-based recipes in the baking world — cider doughnuts spring to mind — but by and large cider isn’t something bakers use very much. Mix it into a dough or batter instead of say, water or milk, […]
READ ONMaybe it’s the contemplative nature of autumn, perhaps its all this talk of cider and scrumpy, but I spent a good deal of the past weekend thinking about small town food traditions, especially the really odd ones I encountered while living in the Southwest of England. There it seems that every little hamlet you happen […]
READ ONWhat I meant to say is that there is also a longstanding farm cider-making tradition in France, as reader Clair reminds me: I live in a small French village in the heart of France and every year in October, there is a celebration of local autumn produce. Having read your post about apple juice and […]
READ ONYou pretty much just let the squeezings sit. That at least is what early Americans did. Given time (ten days or so), yeasts on the skin of the apple go to work consuming the sugars and giving off alcohol. But that’s just one possible way to go. In some cider-making traditions the fermentation is carried […]
READ ONOther than because that’s the way it makes you feel? “Scrumping” is actually a verb. It’s what you do when you’re passing by an orchard and it suddenly occurs to you that you’re hungry, but have no money to pay for fruit. Since there’s no one around, so you swipe it and run.
READ ONThere are a few places left on Earth where it’s possible to sample real farm cider. One of those is the Southwest of England, where I pleasantly passed a year of my undergraduate career. And when I say “passed” I mean only just barely, since so much of my time there was spent sampling Devon […]
READ ONFoodborne illness can come from just about anywhere. It can even be caused by a drink as seemingly wholesome as fresh-squeezed apple cider. Typically, the microbes involved are the usual suspects: Salmonella and Cryptosporidium, but on rare occasion the dreaded E. coli 0157:H7 rears its ugly head, and that can cause rapid serious illness and […]
READ ONIt’s the fickle nature of the apple, as much as anything else, that makes it the perfect fruit for juicing. For you see, apple trees are heterozygous organisms, which means they reproduce sexually and their offspring are rarely (if ever) perfect reproductions of one or other of the parents. That means that whenever you plant […]
READ ONThis, friends, is one serious piece of apple squeezing hardware. An original “Kentucky Buckeye” cider mill, made by the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company here in Louisville. It dates to probably the 1890’s. At that time, just about every family who lived in rural territory east of the Mississippi owned (or at least had access […]
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