Processing apples

Harvest from one of our 12 trees

This year we had our first proper apple harvest, which prompted me to look into storing them for eating fresh through the winter. In a nutshell, I learnt that late-season apples are the best bet for storage and found out that hardly any of our apple varieties store well at all. So, Plan B: process them all before they were past their best, which turned out to be by early November for the two varieties with the best keeping qualities. We've now discovered that we actually prefer the apples in their processed forms rather than fresh, which is just as well.

We made every apple thing we could think of:

• Dried apple rings
• Apple sauce
• Apple ice cream
• Fruit leathers
• Apple jelly
• Apple wine
• Cider
• Cider vinegar
• Apple cordial
• Apple crumble (or pie)
• Baked apples.

I forgot about apple butter, which is on the agenda for next year. Apart from the cider, everything turned out absolutely delicious. The cider is OK, but probably best mulled or turned into vinegar. Next year, wine or cordial only!

First off, I'd recommend the following equipment for speedy processing of apples:

• steam juicer
• electric dehydrator
• apple corer
• mandolin slicer.

Rosehips and apple thinnings in the steam juicer

I don't peel any of my apples - life's too short and there's all sorts of goodness in the skin. To separate the apples into juice and pulp, simply fill the steam juicer with your apples (zero processing needed) and steam for 90 to 120 minutes. Steaming times will depend on the apple type (one cooking variety took just 60 minutes to break down completely). Drain the juice (usually around one litre per fill) and reserve for further processing into jelly, wine, cider or cordial. Then mash through as much of the remaining pulp as possible. This results in a very fine apple sauce, which can form the base of fruit leather, ice cream or simply be bottled or frozen as apple sauce. Any few remaining bits left in the top of the steam juicer are gratefully received by chickens (if you have any) or can be composted.

Dried rings

Apple ring central

This is a great way of preserving apples. The dried rings are lovely to snack on and can also be used in baking throughout the year. Our main use for them is in our morning porridge, where they reconstitute into apple bits. Since we don't buy any fruit, I made 17 large jars of these, which will hopefully last us until June when the new season strawberries will be ripe.

To make apple rings, core the apples and mandolin slice to about 4mm (just under a quarter inch) thick. To prevent discolouration, dip into water with a little citric acid or lemon juice before dehydrating. Lay out the apple rings on your dehydrator trays so that they're not touching and dry at around 60°C/140°F. Drying times will vary depending on the dehydrator and your atmospheric conditions (anything from 4 to 10 hours) - best to check every hour from about the 4 hour mark and remove the rings that are dry. They should be leathery, but not brittle, and not show any signs of moisture when cut. Let them cool for 5-10 minutes and immediately store in an airtight jar.

Apple sauce

A very versatile and efficient way to store apples. You can either freeze it or bottle/can it (using the water bath method or heat the filled preserving jars in the oven at 170°C until bubbles start to form). Either use the puree from your steam juicer or core and mandolin slice 20-odd apples and cook on low heat with a little sugar, plus raisins or spices such as cinnamon or ginger, if desired. The sauce itself makes a lovely dessert, served on its own or with cream, creme fraiche or ice cream, or can be used as a pie filling at a later stage.

Ice cream

Follow our recipe for strawberry ice cream, but substitute the strawberry puree with fine apple sauce (from the steam juicer) and a generous pinch of cinnamon. This is one of the most delicious ice creams ever and we don't know why this isn't a known flavour.

Fruit leathers

Apple and quince fruit leather

The big discovery of the autumn. Wonderful, healthy snacks and fun to make! Simply make an apple sauce, add sugar, spices (cinnamon, ginger or chocolate are good) or other fruit of your choice (mash in quinces for a bit of zing or autumn raspberries, for example). Spread about 0.5cm thick on a piece of silicone sheet, plastic liner or similar and dry either in the dehydrator at 60°C/140°F for about 8 hours (scrape off the sheet about halfway through and place directly on the dehydrator mesh trays) or on the lowest setting on your oven (usually around 70°C). Leave to cool, cut into handy sized pieces with a pair of scissors and dust with icing sugar so that the pieces won't stick to one another (also looks nice). Store in an airtight glass jar.

Jelly

A good way to use up some of the apple juice from the steamer. Apple is good in a jelly combined with rosehips, elderberry or infused with rose geranium.

Wine

Follow our recipe for hedge wine using the juice from the steam juicer. Try adding some rosehips, brambles, elderberries or blackcurrants to the apples in the steam juicer for a nice blend of flavours. These wines can also be used to make vinegar at a later stage (see below). In my opinion, apple wine is one of the best homebrews, delicious hot or cold.

Cider

Small batch of cider

Since we didn't know anyone with a cider press to make cider the traditional way and didn't want to invest in one, I used the ready-sterilized juice from the steam juicer. It was quite a lot of work, running the steam juicer five times to get five litres of juice for a small batch, but at least I got plenty of by-products for making fruit leather! The result is rather tart, but hopefully bottle conditioning will improve it - we added a little sugar at bottling stage to carbonate it. Otherwise it will all go into vinegar production.

Vinegar

To make vinegar from cider or wine, you need to add some 'mother' culture to your alcohol to convert it to acetic acid. You could just leave the cap off your bottle, tie over a clean rag and hope for the best. However, for surer results and to speed up the process, add a cup of unpasteurised cider vinegar to your alcohol for your first batch, then tie over a clean rag and store it in the dark for at least a couple of months before straining it and feeding your resulting gloopy 'mother' with some more hedge wine or cider.

Cordial

Hot fruit cordials are a real delight in the cold days of late autumn and winter. Again, it's nice to combine the apples with rosehips, elderberries or blackcurrants for this. Once you've extracted the juice, add sugar to taste (usually 100-200g per litre) and then bottle/can for long-term storage. I'd err on the side of too little sugar, since you can always add a spoonful of honey to your hot cordial when you're diluting it with hot water. Unfortunately, I only made five half-litre bottles of apple & rosehip and apple & elderberry cordial this year and we're already on the last bottle. Next year, there will be a lot more of these.

Apple crumble (or pie)

Apple berry mix waiting to be crumbled

I'm usually too lazy to make things as involved as pies, but am happy to make a crumble every day! Core and slice the apples (with a mandolin slicer if you wish) and layer in an oven-proof dish. Sprinkle over 2-3 tbsp of brown sugar, depending on the tartness of the apples. Cover with a crumble mixture (100g flour, 50g sugar, 50g soft butter, a little bran if desired) and bake at 175°C/350°F for about 35 minutes or until crumble goes golden brown and apples are soft when pricked with a fork. Serve with creme fraiche, cream or ice cream.

Baked apples

Core the apples, stuff with dried fruit and chopped-up nuts of your choice, bake until they split and are all soft inside. Sprinkle over sugar mixed with cinnamon and serve with custard or double cream.

That's all our apples used up! And we now have a good system in place for efficient processing next year.

Flour power

It doesn't get much fresher.

Milling fresh flour for baking gives one an opportunity to think a bit more about this most basic of ingredients. We keep two big tubs of grain on hand, one rye and one wheat, bought in 20kg sacks, and grind them into flour as needed.

So far, it has mostly been for bread baking, but we're pursuing the logical conclusion here and using fresh milled in a greater variety of baked goods, which hitherto we'd made from bought white flour.

I wasn't entirely clear on how the higher gluten content is achieved in strong white flour or even on the exact differences between brown, wholegrain and white flour and so simply carried on using most of them for one recipe or another.

Bran goodness on top of porridge oats.

An offhand comment from a baking friend about higher gluten brown flour being made simply by sifting out the bran prompted a bit of an RGL flour policy review. I soon discovered that it was possible to use my own freshly milled flour for bread recipes that call for strong white and even for pizza bases, just by sifting out the bran. Then the scientific brain kicked into gear and I looked into it all a little more rigorously.

It was an obvious step to check just what was being sifted out, so I weighed what was coming out of the mill before and after sifting and found that I was removing 20% of the flour mass, which by the way doesn't go to waste as we mix it in with our porridge oats, giving the morning porridge a new texture, flavour and level of nutrition!

In this marvellous information age, when potentially all factoids are there at your fingertips, my curiosity, about what this meant in terms of the composition of a grain of wheat and how it compares with commercially produced flours, was soon satisfied.

image credit: Wheat Foods Council
www.wheatfoods.org

The California Wheat Commission website has a handy section with informational and educational materials for the consumer. It was from there I borrowed the rather excellent wheat grain diagram on the right and gleaned the following facts:

• The wheat kernel has three component parts: the endosperm, bran and germ.
• White flour is derived from the endosperm, which makes up approximately 83% of kernel weight.
• Bran makes up about 14.5% of kernel weight and is included in whole wheat flour.
• The germ comprises about 2.5% of kernel weight and is the part that grows into a new wheat plant. Included in whole grain flour.

These numbers agree surprisingly well with my quick check on the flour mass separated by sifting and suggest that the enrichment for endosperm is quite high.

What are the nutritional considerations?

The germ is typically separated from the grain during commercial milling, since its higher fat content limits the shelf life of the resulting flour, but it also has a very high nutritive value, with plenty of trace minerals, unsaturated fats, B vitamins, antioxidants, phytochemicals and high quality protein. Milling the flour at home means that all this goodness is kept in, so I'm happy about that.

The bran is high in fibre, trace minerals, B vitamins and has a small amount of protein. Ideal for the porridge.

The endosperm is mostly protein (that's what gluten is) and carbohydrates (starch), but also has small amounts of B vitamins, iron and soluble fibre.

Altogether, this is good stuff and milling fresh is the ideal way to get the maximum goodness out of it. Not only that, but it's cheaper as well. Now that's almost too good to be true.

Sourdough: Part 2 - The Loaf

So fresh, so good. One wheat (sliced), one rye.

So, here we are in 2017. I'm not much of a one for New Year's Resolutions, but anybody looking for a good one could do worse than resolve to quit buying bread and bake their own instead. In an earlier post, I got as far as the rye sourdough starter, which is the simple but steadfast and reliable foundation for all sorts of loaves.

Today I baked two loaves, each of about 1 kg, one rye and one wheat, and both from the same rye starter. For the two of us, that will do for just about a week. One of the great things about sourdough bread is its superior keeping qualities. We eat up the wheat loaf first, generally starting when it's still warm, and then move on to the rye, which has a higher moisture content so keeps longer and anyway should be left a day at least after baking to be at its best.

Fundamental rye starter - very runny.

Another excellent thing about sourdough baking is the flexibility of the whole process. Overall, it does take longer than making a yeasted loaf, but the actual hands-on working time isn't much different. The steps that take the time are when the sourdough is busy working its magic and can be tweaked to suit your schedule.

There's a bit of trial and error involved, naturally, but the process is incredibly forgiving, so errors are rarely fatal. This is how I've found it works best for me:

Rye production dough in the morning.

For both the rye and wheat loaves, I prepare the production sourdough sometime in the evening, with a view to baking the next day. In each case, this involves taking a bit of the starter out of the fridge (where it will keep more or less indefinitely in a dormant state), adding some flour and water to it and mixing it up. The rye production dough, which is effectively the same as the starter, is then covered and left out on the kitchen worktop overnight. The wheat production dough is left in the fridge, as it would be well past its peak if left at a warmer temperature for that length of time.

Wheat production dough.

It's convenient then to continue after breakfast. More flour, water, a wee bit of salt and several hours' proving time are all that's needed to transform the production dough into an oven-ready loaf.

I shan't be giving recipes here. I found them in Andrew Whitley's excellent books, so it doesn't seem entirely fair to cut him out and give them away for free! There is a specimen recipe available on the Bread Matters site.

Air-kneading. Essential technique!

I am, however, happy to offer a few tips and observations from my own experience to help smooth the way for anyone getting into this. Here's a classic: It often happens that a sourdough rookie will have their first rye loaf turn out like a brick. This is usually because they have some previous bread baking experience that has created expectations of what the dough should be like. Forget them. They rye sourdough really is meant to be that soft and wet. You don't need to kneed it - just mix and pop it into the tin.

Sourdoughs in general are softer and stickier than what a yeasted bread baker will be used to, which leads me to my next tips. Have a container of water handy when you're working with the dough. A wheat loaf requires kneading, as normal, but the way to stop it all from welding itself to your hands is to keep them moist. Likewise your tools (spatula, dough scrapers) and any surface you intend to set the dough down on before it goes into the tin.

Bread in a bag. Keep it moist.

The normal kneading technique isn't ideal for a wheat sourdough either, so get into air-kneading. Instead of folding and pushing the dough on to the worktop with the heel of your hand, pick the whole thing up and stretch and fold it instead. I find this more effective than pummelling for all sorts of doughs and now air-knead exclusively.

Finally, the long proving times needed for sourdough loaves mean it's imperative to keep the dough surface from drying out. Popping the whole shebang into a plastic bag, which you can then inflate and close the mouth with a twist tie, makes this easy.

Get into sourdough. You won't regret it. It might just change your life.

Sourdough: Part 1 - Intro

Whole grain, the simplest beginning

A year or so ago, I decided it was time to start baking bread here on the homestead. We'd dabbled before, with tolerable if not conspicuous success, but only with yeasted loaves, despite a longstanding interest in sourdough.

What I needed was somebody to help me get started. Somebody to initiate me into the mysteries of baking sourdough bread. Happily such a person came along: good friend Lyn of the Logan Bakehouse. She, along with the invaluable published works of Scotland's sourdough guru, Andrew Whitely, taught me most of what I know about sourdough.

The first thing is to demystify the subject. There's a lot of odd 'folk knowledge' about sourdough floating around out there. The simple truth is that sourdough bread baking is no more difficult than using commercial bread yeast. It does involve keeping a starter culture in your fridge and the proving step does take longer but you end up with a better tasting, better keeping and more nutritious result AND you don't have to keep buying bread yeast.

A bit of exercise to get the freshest ingredients.

This is the almost magical thing about sourdough. All that goes into it is flour, water and a little salt. It's pure. It's fundamental. Wild yeasts and lactobacilli (the same sort of critters that produce yoghurt), found on the surface of the grains and thus in the flour, are what drive the fermentation and thereby leaven the bread. A starter can be made from scratch or, if you have a friend who already has a good one, you can pinch a wee bit to get yours going even more easily.

To keep things simple, stick with just a rye starter. It's the easiest to maintain and you can use it to start off wheat (or other more exotic grain) loaves as well. The whole process is amazingly flexible. Once you have a feel for it, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

Rye starter: very liquid

There's a lot of confusion about sourdough starter maintenance. Several people have asked me, "How do you feed it?", or "Does it take a lot of looking after?" A rye starter, at least, will sit dormant in the fridge almost indefinitely. If it's been months or years since you last used any, it may take a little longer to revive, otherwise it's just a case of taking out 50 or 100 grams, adding some flour and water to it and then letting it sit for a while at room temperature. This is now your production sourdough. When it's all lively and active, you add a bit more flour and water, let it prove and hey: you've got a loaf.

Now, there's a loaf still warm from the oven. Time for dinner, I think.

Next time: Baking the loaf