Crabapple Projects 2023

This summer I harvested a ton of crabapples and had some fun making jelly and cider! 

To see more on my process for harvesting and storing, see my blog post titled “Crabapple Harvest 2023."

Jelly

I started with making the jelly and made two batches. After juicing and freezing the apple juice, I thawed enough for a batch and got to work.

For the first batch, I used a recipe that required no pectin since crabapples have a lot of natural pectin. As I cooked down the juice, I had to go to a temperature that was a bit higher to get the right consistency, and before I new it, made it a little too thick. The flavor is super tart and sweet which I love, but this batch was not spreadable, so I did things a little differently for batch two.

The second time around I used the same recipe, but instead of cooking the juice down so long, I got it to the “jelly” temperature, and used a small amount of pectin. This was to make sure I did not over reduce the juice while making sure it had the correct consistency. Oddly enough, some jars ended up being perfect while others were a bit syrupy. 

So in the end I have two very tasty batches with a wide variety of consistencies and a super beautiful color. I am planning to use the thicker batch to make chocolate bonbons and the runny jars as a form of syrup on breakfast foods and in beverages. 

Here is the recipe I used:https://growagoodlife.com/crabapple-jelly/

Cider

Recently, I tried using half a gallon of the juice to make an alcoholic cider. I have made ciders in the past, so was super excited to try it with fruit from my own yard! 

For this process, I used a similar balance of crabapple juice to apple juice that I do with other flavored ciders I have done. I used about ½ gallon of the crabapple juice and filled the rest of the 1 gallon carboy with regular apple juice from the store. 

For the yeast I have been experimenting with cider specific yeasts. This one ended up not getting as carbonated as I have been used to with fruit beer yeast, so it became very flat, but still alcoholic. 

After about a week in the first ferment stage before racking, the color changed pretty drastically from the bright pink to a yellow. I am a little bummed it did not keep its color, but it was cool to see the transition. 

Once the second ferment was complete, I gave it a taste test and it was way too tart to enjoy. I gave it a little longer in case more time would help, but it had no improvement. I think the main issue was that I used too much crabapple juice, so for the second try, I plan to use about ¼ gallon.

Chocolates

The last project I tried with this batch of crabapples was to make chocolate candies. As mentioned above, the first batch of jelly became way too thick, so it gave me the idea to fill some chocolates for the holidays. This process was fairly simple in that I only used candy melts and the jelly.

I started by filling the molds I have with the candy melt and flipped it over a metal track to drip out and leave a coating. Once that cooled, I filled each with the jelly and put another layer of candy melt over the backs to seal in the jelly. I then put them in the freezer to make sure they started nice and firm and then popped them out of the molds. 

Overall I like the contrast of the tart with the sweet, but the white chocolate flavor of the candy melts was way too sweet for me, so for the next batch I plan to use dark chocolate, and I think they will be perfect for my taste! 

I am so happy that this process was so fun and allowed me to learn so many skills. Hopefully I will find similar inspiration next year once the garden is producing and we see what is successful.