First steps in cider-making

With so many apple trees, I have been unable to do more than invite friends and neighbours over to pick their own, and still the majority of fruit merely ends up being recycled into the soil. So this year I decided to buy a decent slow juicer and start making my own cider. The juicer is from Kuvings, a South Korean manufacturer. Being a slow juicer, with a powerful motor to grind the fruit, little heat is transferred from the machinery to the fruit, thus maintaining its properties. 

The key to all this is scale. To extract one litre of pure apple juice, I need ten apples. Each needs to be washed, quartered, and have bruising cut out. Very few have inhabitants, but these have to be cut out too. The juicer's magazine can hold 400ml of juice, this is released when full into the juice jug. The dry remains are pumped out of the other side, a dense sludge that goes into the compost. The juice jug holds one litre; once full the juicer is switched off, the juice strained a second time and filtered again. This takes time. The by-product here is an exquisite fruit mousse, wonderful to eat with natural yogurt.

In producing 20 litres of juice, I made three kilos of the mousse, stored in jars, filled to the brim to avoid further oxidation. So - to make 20 litres of juice, I need 200 apples. I select windfall apples, they are ripe; newly fallen ones have little if any bruising. No problem here. The limiting factor, the choke-point, is filtering the juice through a strainer. This takes the most time and effort.

Over six hours work over two days, with two lots of half-hour cleaning sessions at the end of it. The juicer needs to be dismantled and washed by hand to remove all apple particles from it - Kuvings supplies three custom brushes for this purpose. The entire kitchen needs a good scrubbing too, all work surfaces, cutting boards, utensils, washing area and floor.

But when all is done, a beautiful outcome. I bought a 20-litre demijohn (100zł from the local hardware store in Chynów), rubber bung with hole and a plastic 'bubbler' tube that allows carbon dioxide out while preventing the ingress of air, which would turn the juice to vinegar. There was also a 34-litre version on sale, but that would be impossible to carry from the kitchen to the cellar once full. 

Left: the 20-litre demijohn, down in my cellar where it will ferment for several months, before being decanted into bottles for a secondary fermentation - and be ready for next summer.

When the water in the tube ceases to bubble, the primary fermentation process will be complete. The cellar is ideal as it is cool in summer and in winter it is warmer than outside.

My basic guides were this BBC Good Food article and this description of a single-variety cider made without yeast or sugar from Cydrownia Przy Sadzie near Grudziądz.

I was interested to discover that a demijohn is not 'half a john', but comes from the French dame-jeanne, or 'Lady Jane'. I'd long thought that the American term for demijohn, carboy, was a brand-name or something to do with a car and a boy - but again no - it's from the Persian qarābah meaning 'big jug', and from this comes the Arabic qarrāba, which morphed into the Spanish garrafa, and thence into carafe (and indeed into the Polish karafka).

More cider-making in future!

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