My folks have a lovely neighbour with a beautiful Red Delicious apple tree. It sounds like she’s had enough years of making apple everything so she kindly shares her apples with my family each fall.

My mom (aka my favorite kitchen partner) and I made a batch of apple chips and apple scrap vinegar a few weeks back. This time we intended to just make apple chips but of course as most of my kitchen projects go, things spiralled.

Anyways, as I was saying, I like to use up every little scrap and the apple chip project grew from a morning activity to an all day and into the night/next day kind of thing. The apples had started to get soft so we opted to do two large vats of applesauce after we got our first load of apple chips into the dehydrator.

To dice the apples for dehydrating I used the Breville Sous Chef 16 Cup Food Processor. It’s a heavy duty machine with lots of options. It works great for cutting the apples uniformly and thin. One of my favorite features is the adjustable dicing disk. I really like that you can quickly adjust the thickness based on the softness and type of apple (it helps to have a thicker slice for really soft apple, you can get away with thinner slices with hard apples). The extra wide plunger chute is a bonus for getting a large volume processed quickly. Here is a link to the processor: https://amzn.to/3Rh2xH7

For this project, I had a handy dandy new apple peeler to try out which made peeling the apples for applesauce very quick. It is also very relaxing to watch work! When the apples get a little older and softer however, the spike that goes to the core doesn’t always hold it in place and you can’t easily peel the apple. I think this would be an issue with any of this style peeler though and it still saved a lot of time and hand fatigue. I like how wide and thin the peel is, very little waste compared to other models I have tried that core and slice.

The peels came off so nicely in long flat strips. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out so I experimented with dehydrating a few of them. Spoiler alert: the peels turned out tasting kind of like cardboard, however the kids oddly enough really enjoyed them!

I decided to try making hard apple cider with the peels as I already have 3 huge jars of apple scrap cider vinegar on the go from the last apple sauce batch. I haven’t made hard apple cider in a long time. I used to do it quite often using an Alchema Cider Maker which has an app with recipes, and tells you how far along the cider is progressing among other things. Once you’ve done it enough times though its pretty simple to dump water, fruit/juice, sugar and brewers yeast to make hard cider.  I use 1/8 of a teaspoon of yeast in this 3L container along with a cup of white sugar. I found the bubbling of fermentation kept bringing the peels above the water line. I had some small round 1 cup glass Pyrex Snapware containers that perfectly fit into the mouth of the containers and worked nicely to keep the peels submerged and prevent mold (https://amzn.to/3GebwCj). Bonus, the containers also fit into my huge 1 gallon Ball jars (https://amzn.to/47rPg48) and worked nicely for the apple cider vinegar. #pyrex-link

The canning of the apple sauce went really well. The apples cooked down nicely and I used my Bamix immersion blender to make it smooth and creamy.  An immersion blender is a must have for me, I use it almost daily for making salad dressings, eggs, whipping cream etc. I’ve had a couple of brands over the years and the Bamix version is a favourite due to all metal, easy to clean, and heavy duty construction.

This brings me to the next surprise project. The next morning when I went to empty the canner, the water had turned a beautiful pinkish color and smelled like delicious apple tea. I was thinking there’s got to be something I could make out of that so I ended up with a new project to try.

I bottled up plain apple tea to mix with and flavour my usual finished black tea kombucha, I also made a new batch of kombucha with half black tea half apple tea. Since starting this post I have tried the black tea apple kombucha and its my favourite to date. I’ve got another experimental kombucha on the go from a few days back made with homemade pineapple tea. Keep an eye out for an upcoming post to come on how to make pineapple tea from fresh pineapple scraps!

Overall a busy but fun day visiting and working in the kitchen with my mom!

Please comment if you are interested in more details on any of the projects! I’ve got more videos on youtube and Pinterest pins on my favourite appliances and am continuing to learn how to edit and create enjoyable content 🙂 Thanks for reading my post!