WineLovers Discussion Group

Each year the same question: What to do with the load of apples your precious trees produce? You cannot do more than a certain amount of apple cakes and the space in the freezer is also needed for other stuff. One can make cider (as I do) if there is a place near where one can have the apples pressed, but the best ciders are not made from sweet and tasty garden apples, but rather more tart and bitter wild apples. My solution is to produce dried apple rings. To do this efficiently two pieces of equipment is of great help: an apple lathe and an electrical drier. I’m not sure how well known these gadgets are so here is a short, illustrated description of the process:
The apple lathe one of my favourite utensils and it is the key to speeding up the process. It peels, removes the core and cuts the remains of the apple in a thin spiral in one single action, just by turning the crank, so the only thing you need to do then, to get apple rings is to cut through the spiral.
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Then I put the rings on the mesh bottoms of the shelves in the drier and set the temperature to about 45 C/115 F and the timer to 8 hours, normally letting it run over the night, and my dried apple rings are ready to be packed in a glass container to be used as/instead of candy.

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These rings are hugely popular among the friends of my daughter, so quite an amount of batches need to be produced each year.

Cheers, Anders

PS. BTW, I'm curious who owns (and uses) an apple lathe?

Great post. I have a dehydrator but not a lathe--do you use it for other things besides apples?

Oh, and you didn't mention using an acid preservative, but I would thinkyou'd need one to prevent the apples from turning brown. Do you?

Those lathes are great! My wife bought one at a church rummage sale a couple of years ago. She uses it for apple tarts, pies, etc. I used it for the first time a couple of weeks ago when I helped her with a tart. It made very short work of peeling and coring 6 apples. Plus the long string of peel was quite the conversation piece for my daughter.


Mike

Nice work, Anders, and very tasty too. I don't own a lathe or a dehydrator, but your photos make me wish I did.
Best

Thanks Jenise!
No, presevative used. Directly from the lathe to the dehydrator and they don't become any browner than in the picture. Of course if you want them whiter, you could use some citric or ascorbic acid, but I don't mind them slightly brownish as they are.
Cheers, A

Anders Källberg wrote:I'm curious who owns (and uses) an apple lathe?

No lathe here, Anders, or dehydrator either! As I said in Chat, though, this is a great report and I'm sure will tempt a lot of people to acquire these tools.

I'm glad to see the image upload worked out okay!

Thanks for the help with the image upload, Robin! It felt good to use the old, familiar software again! (I have to admit I still miss it a little...)
BTW, the dehydrator is great for drying mushrooms too!
Cheers, Anders

Anders Källberg wrote:Thanks Jenise!
No, presevative used. Directly from the lathe to the dehydrator and they don't become any browner than in the picture. Of course if you want them whiter, you could use some citric or ascorbic acid, but I don't mind them slightly brownish as they are.
Cheers, A

No, I don't either Anders. That's a good natural color, I was just surprised that they didn't brown before they went into the dehydrator. Certain apple types are less susceptible and season matters too--you're obviously using a perfect apple for your purpose.

Jenise wrote:I was just surprised that they didn't brown before they went into the dehydrator. Certain apple types are less susceptible and season matters too--you're obviously using a perfect apple for your purpose.

They go directly into the dehydrator, which probably is important to keep the browning down. Once there, the surface of the rings rather quickly gets a dry skin, which I suppose helps keeping the oxidation away.

Regarding the type (variety?) of apples I use, I'm not sure if any of them are particularily unsuseptible to browning. The two I have used in the batch I showed here are James Grieve and Signe Tillisch - two great apples IMHO. In particular the James Grieve rings get almost caramelized when I dry them hard. Yummy!
Anders

Ditto what Alan said. Nice post, Anders! I'm inspired.


JuliaB