The Year of the Ice Apple

 Apples remaining on the Bitter Red Tree after earlier harvesting. 

Bishops Mills, along Buker Road, 19 January 2017.

This winter, many Apple trees have held their fruit long after it would have fallen in any other year. 

In November we were still bringing in apples from our own wild trees "out back" which were still good and firm, their sweetness having resisted many nights of freezing temperatures. 

We sliced the good parts away from the cores and ran them through the food dehydrator until we had two gallon jars full of sweet leathery pieces, some of which are dark and crisp, shattering between our teeth in an instant burst of rich apple flavour.






In January, after the holiday cooking and visiting and feasting was all over and both the solar and calendar years successfully ushered in, we noticed as we drove along roadside fencerows around home and beyond, that certain Apple trees were still loaded with frost-browned fruit. 

So on one Saturday outing we harvested a popcorn bag full of frozen Apples, brought them home, and Fred ran them through the Foley Food Mill.

When I was a girl applesauce was made by stewing Apples that had been cored and peeled - but even long-established traditions of handling food give way to other long-established traditions! 

Fred's Stone-side ancestors, with the windfalls of Grandpa Stone's entire orchard to process, cooked the Apples whole and ran them through a Foley Food Mill, dividing the material into squeezed-out sauce and a residue of skins, stems, and seeds.  A food mill is a bowl-like device with a pierced colander-like bottom, over which a bent metal blade is cranked to crush food material and force it through the holes in the bottom, while a wire arm sweeps the puree from the underside. While putting Apples through a Foley Food Mill was a foundational household activity in Fred's childhood, applesauce isn't even mentioned in the wikipedia 'food mill' article.

Grandma Stone's Foley Food Mill "To clean, remove thumb screw, lift out masher. 

Foley Mfg co, Minneapolis, US patent 1921936."

We inherited both Fred's mother's larger post-World War II mill, and a smaller one from his Grandma Stone, which must be going on 80-95 years old now. The braces which hold the mill onto the bowl which receives the sauce fell off the larger one, and we haven't used a mill for some years, going with the Karstad cut-and-core method when we made applesauce. 

Modern mills are advertised with "Foley" in quotes and an indication that they're made in China, so we assume these mills are a nonrenewable resource. This fall, we got back into using Grandma Stone's mill, because Fred was cutting slices off Apples for the dehydrator, and needed to process the cores in the absence of Chickens.

All fall we've been seeing Apple trees that have retained, rather than dropping, their fruit. As descendants of crosses between graft-propagated varieties, wild Apple trees are hugely variable in all their characteristics, and while about three quarters of the trees on our land had dropped their fruit before the October rain that ended the season-long drought, we saw this failure-to-fall was only on those individuals that usually fall late - the Bitter Red Tree and the Pseudo-pear Tree. 

A Sugar Maple with retained leaves, 22 January 2017, 

North Augusta.

We attribute this retention of the fruit to a revival of metabolic activity after the rain, and suppose that this revival had inhibited the formation of abscission layers in the stems of the fruit. This failure-to-fall has also affected the leaves of many Sugar Maples, especially low on the trees. 

We got started on Apples late this year, and picked fruit from several late trees for drying before the first hard freeze. After they've frozen Apples always look a lot like applesauce, but there were so many this year that we finally used some. We'd been primed by the news of ice wine made in Ontario vineyards, and Laurie McCannell's facebook announcement that she was going to gather fruit from her parents' orchard to make "ice cider" was a final trigger.

The Carp Road tree, Sept 2012,

 from google streetview.

We've seen the tree where we got the Apples along the Carp Road, 2.73 km SE Carp, each time we've come to Carp for the display of my paintings. 
After things froze its hemispherical shape was densely covered with shining brown fruit. Finally on 2 January 2017, we stopped at an intersection and Fred walked back through the half-metre of snow to fill a popcorn bag with the oozing fruit. The abundance of the treeful, of which he only took less than a percent, was spectacular.

There was some leakage of sweet juice lost through a tiny hole in one corner of the reused bag, but we got them home, and into our big steel bowl. 

These apples were all soft and oozing with no signs of Insect infestation or deformity. Fred put them through Foley Food Mill after scissoring a slash in each Apple (to reduce squirting), and cutting crosswise into 1 cm slices.

The first product was about 2300 ml of living sauce, which included some juice which oozed directly from the unbroken fruit. It was smooth and sweet, with a flavour like apples in fresh air! 

Then he gently cooked the remaining mass of pulp with skin and seeds (with addition of 200 ml or so of the Ginger, honey, and lemon elixir that Jennifer made for the choir), on the wood stove, and put it again through the Food Mill, producing 1400 ml of thick and creamy sauce that was plenty sweet enough - rich & puddinglike. He added some refined sugar to half of it and canned it as apple butter. 

He then took the residue from this and cooked it with water, for 900 ml of mild low-acid slurry that was only just sweet enough, which we used with juices as the basis of our nightly hot beverage.

This left 500 ml of final residue, mostly stems and seeds, which he put out under the Transparent Apple Tree to see what might be attracted to it. No tracks have shown up around it yet, but there may yet be Squirrels or Cottontails or Jays when it gets cold again.

So this processing produced 4.6 litres of product and 500 ml of waste, from a nominal 9 litres of Apples. "For equal spheres in three dimensions the densest packing uses approximately 74% of the volume:" so this is  70% of the volume of a nominal 6.7 litres of initial material (with a couple 100 ml of water added for both the cooking and the liquid sauce), and it's plausible to think that a frozen Apple would be 30% air.

So that's the tale of ice applesauce - perhaps the three-fold processing was a bit obsessive, but our questions about the utility of frozen apples are answered and we've had a couple of weeks of interesting drinks and sauce, and the apple butter is still to be opened.

Laurie McCannell grew up with an orchard, which her parents still manage. She told us:

"I grew up quartering then cooking entire (with peel & core) apples which we put through the "food sieve" - a conical perforated metal sieve and a fat wooden peg! The crank sounds like a welcome innovation. Residual skins & seeds get scraped out of the sieve as needed & yes, it makes good chicken food. We also used this device for stewed pumpkin & stewed tomatoes. 

"The seed case & skin of apples contain a lot of natural pectin, which is why we leave them for cooking. I also keep the skin & seed aside if I make pie, then cook those to get apple jelly (add minimal water, drain through cheese cloth).

"Late apples: different apples mature & drop at different times. I agree (although I didn't know the words!) with the notion that timing of fall rain plays a role in how clinging the late fruit is (early trees drop fruit in August no matter). Late fruiting apples interest me because these varieties tend to store better and make better cider. I don't understand why but the aromatic parts of the flavour are usually more interesting & durable in late apples, so i too have been found prowling fruit-spangled roadside apple trees, usually around this time of year with a grafting knife in hand...

"Some apples do not "freeze". A neighbour here tells me of one with dark red flesh which lingered on the trees until mid winter and when then picked was never hard frozen. Riddle me that!"