Crab apple recipes

Yorky

Does anyone know any good crab apple receipes.? I've got a tree brimming with fruit and should really use them or leave them to the birds?

The Sweeper

Ooo, crabapple jelly, Yorky!

You'll need an enormous saucepan, lots of sugar, big bowls, muslin, lots of clean jars and a jelly-making recipe.

Basically, pick your crabapples. It's a fiddly job - you might get further by gently shaking the tree. Don't be tempted to include any windfall apples.

Depending how many you get, you need to wash and pick over the fruit - either in the sink or in the bathtub. Remove leaves and excess stalk and discard anything that's been half-eaten while still on the tree. If they're the tiny crabapples less than the size of ping pong balls, leave the fruit whole - even if you do cut it, don't core it or remove seeds.

Now I will recommend you Google a couple of crabapple jelly recipes, but basically you'll need to find an average ratio, from the recipes online, of pints of water to pounds of fruit, and then later an average for pounds of sugar to pints of liquid.

The method is as follows - you boil the fruit in water until soft. At this point you can also be tempted (I usually am!) to add some whole spices for flavour - cinnamon, cloves and star anise are good, but don't add too much (and use whole, not ground spices). This part doesn't take long - half an hour or 40 minutes, if even.

You should end up with a liquid, boiled fruit pulp. Strain the liquid off from the pulp - I've done things like tied muslin between two high-back bar stools and poured the pulp and liquid through it, and the liquid gathers in a huge bowl underneath the stools. If you let the liquid drain off gently, without giving into the temptation to squeeze the bag, you'll have a more clear jelly at the end. Try leaving it overnight.

What you come out with is a muslin bag of dry-ish pulp and a large basin of clear crabapple liquid. The jelly-making phase involves boiling the liquid again with sugar. Crabapples are, I believe, like quinces - they have a lot of pectin in their skin and cores, so you shouldn't need to add other setting agents to the mix. However look at using jam-making sugar anyway.

The pulp left in the muslin - add it to your compost heap - you can use it to make a crabapple paste but it's tedious work and if this is your first time making jelly, I'd recommend just going the jelly route first and leaving the paste to later.

You boil the sugar and crabapple juice together - it'll start off a straw colour and eventually be a deep, clear red colour. You can use a sugar thermometer to reach the right temperature, or your own judgement - personally when making fruit jelly with pale fruit - quinces, crabapples - I boil the liquid until it reaches a rolling boil that can't be stirred away, and then I leave it at that temperature until it has changed colour to the deep red I was talking about.

There are other testing methods to see if your jelly will set - put a plate in the fridge. Take it out when cold, and put a teaspoon of the boiling liquid on it. Leave it for a minute. It should set on the plate so that, if you push it with your finger, it'll wrinkle up. If your finger goes straight thorough like you're stealing a taste of sauce from someone else's plate, it's not ready to be poured into jars because it won't set.

Once the boiling liquid is at the right temperature and stage in its life cycle, you take it off the boil and jar it up. I like to put it into sterilised jars (the dishwasher is a good place to sterilise jars, because of the heat used in the drying process at the end) while it's hot, and seal the jars while it's hot. (Either seal the jars when it's still boiling hot, or wait for it to cool entirely. If you fiddle about and only seal them when it's cooled but isn't cold, you'll get condensation inside the jar.)

It's a lot of work, making jams and jellies, but its fun, it's a great way to use up a heavy crop of less than edible fruit, and your produce lasts for AGES. Just yesterday I opened another jar of quince jelly that I made from last Autumn's crop here, and we had it with cheese and crackers and it was bloody marvellous.

The last time I made crabapple jelly, we came out with a delicate jelly that was best taken out of jars using a teaspoon and spread over toasted muffins. Yummmmm...

PS: Whenever I'm making preserves, I'm struck by what a potentially dangerous pastime it would be if I had a house full of kids, because you're basically working with and moving around gallons of scalding, sticky liquid that can't be easily rubbed off if it splashes or spills. I've got no kids myself, so I'm open to argument on this from parents, but I'm not convinced preserve-making is something to include your small children in!

Minder

Pan fry whole crab apples in a little butter with a star anise, a piece of cinnamon and a tbsp of sugar until soft. Use as an alternative to apple sauce with roast pork.

Yorky

Thanks for the replies everyone. The jelly ws going to be too time consuming so I mixed the apples with some wild blackberries and made a crumble - delicious!