Advice on Fresh Apple Prep (No Press)

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We picked a grip of apples the other day that have excellent flavor. I am currently full up on all my wine/beer capacity, so I can't do anything with them right now.

I also don't have a press to extract the juice. Can I core the apples and puree them in a food processor, and then freeze the puree to use at a later time?

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!!
 
We picked a grip of apples the other day that have excellent flavor. I am currently full up on all my wine/beer capacity, so I can't do anything with them right now.

I also don't have a press to extract the juice. Can I core the apples and puree them in a food processor, and then freeze the puree to use at a later time?

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!!

I wouldn't puree them- that would be a huge mess when you tried to get juice out of them!

What I do is freeze them whole (but you can certainly core them first if you want!). When I make the cider/wine, I put them still frozen in big mesh bags. They thaw and sort of fall apart as mush. I ferment for 5 days or so, and then "press" them by squeezing the mesh bags and hard as I can and until no juice drips out. It is fairly labor intensive, but it works pretty well.
 
thanks yooper, you always seem to come to my rescue on my obscure fresh fruit questions :)

do you know the whereabouts of a recipe that will guide me on how many apples/gallon to use?
 
We picked a grip of apples the other day that have excellent flavor. I am currently full up on all my wine/beer capacity, so I can't do anything with them right now.

I also don't have a press to extract the juice. Can I core the apples and puree them in a food processor, and then freeze the puree to use at a later time?

Any advice is greatly appreciated, thanks!!

I've done the blender+pillowcase and you do get some juice, but not much. It's alot of trouble, very messy, and produces very poor results.
 
thanks yooper, you always seem to come to my rescue on my obscure fresh fruit questions :)

do you know the whereabouts of a recipe that will guide me on how many apples/gallon to use?

I don't make much cider, but I make wine with apples and/or crabapples. I add water and sugar to boost up the ABV. To get an idea, you could look at my crabapple wine recipe. It's basically the same technique, but if you want to make just cider you would leave out the sugar and water of course!
 
that makes sense, Fletch. it seems Yooper's approach would be faster, easier than puree anyway.

I'll take a look at your crabapple recipe Yooper. These apples are very tart, but have a good balance of sweetness. Probably some of the best apples direct from a backyard tree I've ever tasted. Would make excellent pie! I'm thinking I want a lower alcohol cider instead of wine, so I might experiment. Maybe some 1 gallon jugs are in order to play with some variances??
 
oh and, Yooper, there's never enough football...Go Huskers!
 
yooper, if i use your crabapple wine recipe for a cider, i would of course leave out the sugar. but should i increase the apples to 7 lbs, or just leave it around 6 lbs? i'm going to cruise the cider forum a little more to see what an approximate gravity would be to start out a cider.
 
i don't know, sounds pretty easy under yooper's program: freeze the apples whole, thaw them out in the bucket with mesh liner, smash up when thawed, remove mesh liner when done. can't be too bad, right? *says with the highest expectations of simplicity*
 
I made fig wine last year this very same way, don't see why it wouldn't work with apples. Yummy.
 
Yummy! It's very high alcohol cause I boosted it with a bunch of Turbinado Sugar. It's about a year old now, and is finally settling down from rocket fuel. It is very much like a Tawney Port, except bone dry. Some here like to put a little sugar in the glass at the table. It tastes like the figs that I used (35 lbs for 7+gal)--very earthy flavor. We have a mission fig tree (fruit, black outside, red inside) that had a bumper crop last year, so every few days I picked a gallon freezer bag full, halved them to get the big bugs out, and then froze them until I had enough to make the wine.
I used the food processor on the frozen halved figs to make a slush, I think I also food processed up 5 whole blood oranges (rind and all) and a few bananas for acid, complexity, and body.

I put all the partially frozen, slushy fruit in muslin socks from my LHBS, and put half the sugar and a few gallons water in a twenty gallon food grade trash can.
Just to be sure, I killed it overnight (18-24hrs) with a quarter teaspoon of potassium metabisulfite and pitched with ec16 or 18 or something like that, cloth covered open air primary, punched it down for several days, put on latex gloves, washed my hands real well, and wrung out the socks each by hand. Then I stirred the batch real well added the rest of the sugar and racked into two carboys. There was a lot of fruit goo that settled out in another month, so I racked and racked some more.

So you will need to add sugar water or juice to your apple mash to get the ferment started, but by the end of primary, you should be able to get most of the juice out of the apple mash through the muslin pores.
 
excellent! thanks hex, wish i had some fig trees in my backyard--don't think they'd do so well on our midwest climate. i'd have to pay royally for that many figs around here!
 
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