Using the Whole Apple

June 06, 2016

It's apple season. This means that it's time for my trusty Ezipeeler to be out making piles of curly apple.

This week I got 8kg of organic juicing apples from our food co-op. My plan was to stew them all and bottle the apple sauce. But in a moment of inspiration I decided to dehydrate some as well.

The Hoopla boys were asleep so I had some lovely Mummy Daughter time perched at the end of the kitchen bench. Hoopla kid one started with some peeling then moved on to laying the pieces out on the trays while I continued to peel, core and slice the apples.

Now Hoopla kids one has a great memory. Early in the process she requested we make juice as well, for freezing as ice blocks. She remembered this from last year. So while the apples were stewing and drying we pulled out the juicer.

And what did we juice? All the cores and skin! Instead of sending the peelings straight to the compost we got some more out of them. And it's surprising how much juice you can get out of scraps that normally go straight in the compost.

By the end of our kitchen session we had turned our 8kg of apples into:

3.5 litres of apple sauce which I bottled to save space in the freezer for other things.
A couple of jars of dried apple slices
1.6 litres of apple juice which I froze as ice blocks as well as a couple of portions ready for adding to my favourite rhubarb crumble recipe.
A bowl of yummy worm food.

The whole apple put to use, down to the last bit feeding the worms.

Apple Processing