The Honest Courtesan

This is called pomace; it’s the stuff left over after finely-chopped apples are crushed for juice.  And I usually have a lot of it at this time of year.  I collect a bucket of apples, tossing aside the ones bugs have bored into or that are too small to work with.  Then I peel and core them using a hand-crank device which really speeds up the job; I can process a large bucket of apples in about an hour, less if they’re large.  Next, the peeled apples go into an attachment on my Kitchen Aid which finely chops them, and the resulting drippy mess gets dumped into this mesh bag and put through the cider press.  After the juice is squeezed out and put into carboys to ferment, what’s left is this dry apple debris, a mass like this for every liter or two of juice (the apples seem a bit less juicy these year, perhaps because there are so many of them).  Fortunately, the animals like it; I mix it together with oats and use it for their feed.  Cicero also likes the cores, and I throw some of the peels to the chickens and the rest on the compost heap.  We try not to waste anything!  And once I get enough cider for the year, there is still apple butter and apple bread and apple pie and stewed apples and…