Apple Cider

Our neighbors have an apple tree.  It is not coddled like a lot of fruit trees.... not watered this summer or sprayed.  It is just an old, tough farm tree that has been able to survive the hot, dry summers on its own without any help from humans.  Perhaps in better years it produced better quality apples.  But, this year I think it was lucky to be able to produce any fruit at all due to the drought and triple digit temperatures.

At any rate, the neighbors told us to help ourselves to whatever apples were on the tree.  Here are some of them.

These are some of the better looking ones.  Most of them are small and have blemishes, like the one in the upper right of this picture. 

I bought a juicer that I found on sale a couple of months ago.  I used it once this summer to juice some beets and carrots and decided I would give it a whirl making apple cider.

You do not have to peel or core the apples.  You just feed them in whole!

The debris from whatever you are juicing collects in the clear hopper on the left and the juice comes out the other side.  It is sort of like a food processor.  The food goes in the top and a plunger is used to push it down into the blades.

The top comes off so you can remove the hopper and dispose of the debris.  We put it in a bucket and Tom fed it to the chickens.  They loved it!

Since the apple juice is un-strained, it looks cloudy.  I put it in a sauce pan and heated it to boiling to kill any bacteria that might have been on the apples.  Then I added some brown sugar, cinnamon and a pinch of nutmeg. 

Next step was to pour up a cup and enjoy!