I know I’ve said this several times, but we’ve had a wonderful year for growing foods. Apples are no exception. At least three of our trees were heavy producers which have given us plenty of apples do what we want with. In past years I have made apple pie filling which I freeze for making pies throughout the year, I have canned apple sauce, and we have dehydrated apples.

We have found that we usually don’t eat much of the applesauce or the dehydrated apples, so we decided to do something different this year.

So far, I have enough pie filling in the freezer to make 8 pies. The other thing we are doing is making apple cider.

We have never made cider before because we do not have an apple press, but this year we figured out how to make cider without a press.

It’s not as efficient as using a press, we first peel (the peel could be left on), core, and slice the apples then put them in the blender. We are doing small batches.

We add just a little bit of water to get them going and we blend the apples until they are pureed.

We then strain out the juice (cider). To do this we put the puree in a fine mesh juice bag, then set that in strainer over a bowl or pot.

We then put a smaller bowl on top of the juice bag and press down on it to help squeeze the juice out. We’ll let it drip for a while then come back and press some more.

I have been pasteurizing the cider then freezing what we don’t drink, but we are also going to make some hard cider which will be made with raw (unpasteurized) cider. I’ll let you know how that turns out.

Thanks for reading!