New Poll! what do you do with your apples & pears?

[Cidermaker]

Last year, I picked six and a half tons of apples all by hand and pressed them. I turned them into cider and apple juice but this year has been a lousy year for apples and so far, instead of making 3000 litres, I've only managed a few hundred.

[sammy_roser]

A bit of everything! It's my dads tree but there's more then enough to go around, I start off baking with them and pressing them for juice, then as he gets too many to deal with they get dried.

[Mikey]

Well, I don't generate huge quantities from my stepover and espalier, so they are all eaten. I'm not into drying them, I actually really enjoy that bitter sweet flavour straight off the tree.

[solway cropper]

Last year, I picked six and a half tons of apples all by hand and pressed them. I turned them into cider and apple juice but this year has been a lousy year for apples and so far, instead of making 3000 litres, I've only managed a few hundred.

Hmm, I thought my 20 gallons of cider was impressive

Still, it did send me to bed with a smile on my face quite a few times

[jessmorris]

eat them raw!

[The Large One]

Pear and cinnamon jam, my favourite Mmmmmm

[StephenH]

Mostly make cider, when I get a good enough harvest. I add a proportion of crabs from public trees, for a bit of bite.

[seneca196]

Eat them as is. The less done to them the better in my book. Hence, I only like desert varieties I can bite into. Don't much care for cooking and making things from them. Probably comes from way back when we had a very productive Bramley (or one of it's variants) in the old garden. Had the apples every way possible with just about everything imaginable ... and for with jams, chutneys, sauces etc. seemed like the entire year. Glad it's in the past!

Incidentally, is no one concerned about the amounts of sugar that's often added to some of the culinary varieties? Apparently there are some varieties that can be baked on their own and turn deliciously sweet without the need the add anything. Think James Grieve might be one of them.

[SarzWix]

That would probably be because James Grieve is considered a dual purpose apple - eater and cooker. So it would naturally be sweeter than a cooker like Bramley.

[Bill HH]

When I was a lad a few friends and myself picked a couple of barrow loads of windfall crab apples off our farm, we had decided to make scrumpy big time. I had to keep it hidden from my father in case he disapproved of a 12 year old supplying all the other kids in our villiage. Well it brewed ok and we were all very excited but when the great tasting day came it was like drinking sulphuric acid!!! I stole most of my moms sugar store and bunged that in and it still tasted like sulphuric acid. A few of us (me included) managed to convince ourselves that this was how scrumpy should taste and we downed a few pints! I remeber laughing a lot at the severe stomach pain.
Anyway in the end we tipped the whole lot onto the concrete yard which turned instantly black! and stayed that colour for several years. My dad often remarked on it but i just said "Its a mystery"
We also had a giant Bramley cooking apple tree that would produce tons of huge apples, I used to love cutting one up and dipping slices in sugar, it made your mouth pucker like eating raw lemon. A group of us also decided we could smoke sugar beet pulp purely on the grounds that it looked vaguely like tobacco, our pipes (nicked from Grandad) erupted like a volcano with thick acrid smoke and we all ended up in a communal vomit! Eeee those were the days.

[Bren In Pots]

We've got a couple of Worcester Pearmain trees and although they're an eating apple I use them for baking and chutney because they don't store to well.

[Alison]

I too am surprised that the option for just eating them wasn't there as that's what we do with most of ours as we don't get large crops as the trees are quite young on the whole. I do however get given loads of cookers in particular and OH forages tonnes of them. These are used for cider, apple juice, chutney, jams, etc. Any crab apples I find (which are very easy to locate round here) tend to be used for various jellies, especially spiced crab apple jelly which is very popular with everybody that has tasted it

[seneca196]

Great stuff Bill HH. Sounds like an eventful and enjoyable childhood. Always seems funnier later in life, often not so at the time! Most of what I scrumped as a kid, was pretty inedible come to think of it. Rock hard and sour.... who could wait for ripening..... some other kid would have got them! No collective thinking, and often no thinking at all. Clambering over a fence to evade an irate owner and only being saved from falling headfirst by a nail snagged on my trousers. Dangling inches above concrete seems funny now, not so at the time. Happy days? hmm..... maybe.....

[wizzbang]

A lot of the apples on the trees in the orchard here are enjoyed by the WASPS! but there are plenty to go round. I have been eating them raw, gosh they are all so tasty. I peel, core and freeze them if they have fallen, but the nice big fresh eating apples are put in the potting shed, polished and wrapped in newspaper to protect them ready to eat all winter. There are loads on the trees and my daughter and myself will probably pick them mid October and put them in store too. I think the wasps are encouraged by the plum tree that is planted in the orchard and they go from there straight to the apples once all the plums are finished. The plums were scrummy and the pears are really tasty too. Its been a good year for them I think.
My daughter has bottled all the pears. We only have two pear trees so it hasn't been a massive task. But the apples have taken a lot of time and I think they will take up a lot of time in the next few weeks too.
Lynne x