Crabapples are the overlooked fruit of the orchard, like stepchildren in the family of cultivated apples. They're usually too small to be considered for fresh-eating. Many varieties are quite tart and require the addition of sweetening to make them palatable. And small fruit size means the harvesting is a lot more work than their larger cousins.
However, they do well where cultivated apples sometimes struggle. They're loaded with vitamins and antioxidants. And they're often quite prolific. You know me, I try to make the most of what we've been given.
It looks like there are more crabapples than I had thought. So far I've done 4 major pickings and there are still many more on the tree. Today I did a little pruning of this tree, as I had with the fig tree. I figure it can take a little pruning, if it's producing so well. I thinned out some crossing branches and areas where branches were building up moss, a sign the tree is too dense. As I pruned, one daughter and I plucked the crabapples off those branches. My daughter had about a half-hour before she needed to get herself ready to leave, and I really, really appreciated the help and companionship while I worked. Having help does more than just save time. It makes tedious tasks more enjoyable.
So far I've made crabapple sauce, crabapple juice, and crabapple jelly. I'm eager to find new uses for all of these crabapples.
In order to motivate myself to do another batch of these beauties, I decided to do something different with what we would harvest today.
I made a batch of crabapple cider vinegar followed by a batch of crabapple and applesauce fruit leather. I won't know for a few weeks if the crabapple cider vinegar turned out. And I won't know until tomorrow if we like the fruit leather. I'll make another batch of fruit leather if we like the taste of this one.
From what I read, making apple cider vinegar is a two-step process -- ferment the apples in a water/sugar/apple cider vinegar with mother (the clump of living organisms that works like a starter for batches of vinegar) solution to an alcohol stage, then strain out the apples and continue the fermentation process until the alcohol turns to vinegar.
If this really works, I'll have a new supply of apple cider vinegar for pennies each year. I had a bottle of vinegar with the mother already, so no cost there. And the sugar was just a couple of tablespoons. Crabapples are free for me.
I don't have a way to test the percentage of acidity, which means that homemade vinegar would not be a safe choice for making canned pickles. But it certainly can be used in refrigerator pickles (the overnight kind), salad dressings, marinades, ketchup and BBQ sauces, to add flavor to soups and stews, as well as for household cleaning and hair rinses.
After using a couple of cups of the crabapples in the vinegar, I cooked the rest as crabapple sauce. I blended the sweetened crabapple sauce with unsweetened homemade regular applesauce. It's a combo that we find pleasing. Some crabapples are actually on the sweet side. Not ours. Ours are quite tart and astringent. To eat as sauce, I blend it half and half with regular applesauce. The full-strength crabapple sauce (once sweetened) is, however, fine in applesauce-raisin bar cookies and applesauce cake, where the other flavors in the baked goods mute the astringency of the crabapples.
This evening, I have 6 trays of fruit leather drying in the dehydrator. If we like it, I have several new quarts of crabapple sauce, made today, to turn into additional fruit leather. Fruit leather will take up less storage space in the freezer, doesn't require additional freezer containers or canning jars, and will provide fruit servings when our fresh apples and pears are gone.
The rest of the harvest
I picked, washed, and wrapped the last cabbage head today. The carrots and their greens are now tucked away. I would like to do one more harvest of unripe figs and one more harvest of crabapples. And that just leaves one more meal of Swiss chard, the turnips and beets, and fresh radish greens, kale, and Brussel sprouts to use as we want this fall. And then I can dust the 2025 dirt off my hands for good.
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