Mom's Homemade Apple Cider (Non-Alchoholic)

crazy crafter's Note:

When I was growing up my mom made a version of this every fall to help get rid of the apples that were starting to wrinkle and weren't bad just yet and she'd make apple jelly with the juice too. I hope you like it as much as my family did and now my neighbors do :)

• Total Time: 3 hrs 15 mins
• Prep Time: 15 mins
• Cook Time: 3 hrs

Ingredients:

Serves: 6-8

Yield: 0.5 gallon

• 8 -10 apples (I used gala for a less tart or intense taste)
• 1/2-1 cup sugar
• 4 tablespoons cinnamon (or 4 cinnamon sticks)
• 4 tablespoons allspice

Directions:

1. Quarter your apples (no need to remove peel or seeds).
2. In a large stock pot add your apples and fill with water--just enough to cover the apples.
3. Add your sugar.
4. Wrap your cinnamon and allspice in a doubled up cheese cloth and tie, and add this to the apples and water.
5. Boil on high for one hour (uncovered) checking on it frequently.
6. Turn down heat and let simmer for two hours (covered).
7. Take off the heat after two hours of simmering and let cool.
8. Remove spices and mash up the apples to a pulp like consistency (a potato masher works well for this).
9. Once cool pour into a strainer over a large bowl. When most of the juice has drained away, put the remainder of the pulp into a doubled up cheese cloth and squeeze over the bowl until no more juice comes out.
10. (At this point you can either restrain the juice to get out the little bits of pulp that remain with a cheese cloth draped inside the strainer to catch them or just leave it like I do).
11. You can store in an air tight container in your refrigerator for up to a week or you can freeze it for later use if you like.
12. Reheat in the microwave or on the stove and enjoy either plain or you can add caramel syrup or caramels, whipped topping with cinnamon or, like my neighbors did if you like it really sweet, with marshmallows or marshmallow creme.
13. also you could make this a diabetic recipe by omitting the sugar and adding diabetic sweeteners to taste in place of the sugar or none at all.

Reviews

[Sharonanneo]

AWESOME recipe! If you use whole spices and not ground ones, you should have no problem with the cheesecloth. My entire house smells delicious; this is a perfect thing to make on a fall day when you've got company coming!

[crmsonbuterfly]

this recipe would've gotten 5+ stars from me except the whole spices in the cheese cloth threw me off. After fighting with the cheese cloth and finally deciding that the cinnamon and allspice would just end up falling through the cloth anyway, i decided to just dump all the spices in. I used 1/2 cup sugar and 1/2 dark brown sugar. added nutmeg and cloves. after dumping the mixture through a strainer i had to taste the result and it tasted wonderful. i gave my DH a small taste and he said it was thicker then he expected but i think that came from all the spices being added in. It is absolutely wonderful and i havent even strained the apples through cheesecloth yet. thanks for a great simple (besides the cheesecloth thing) recipe. I fell in love with apple cider all over again:)

[Dee514]

Oops, tried this last year and forgot to review it. Actually I made two (3 gallon) batches, one with the spices (I put them in a tea ball instead of cheesecloth), and one without the spices. I used a mix of macintosh and delicious apples with a few winesap apples for extra flavor, since they are "sweet" apples I cut the sugar back to 1/3 cup and that was plenty sweet for us. I also substituted some store bought unsweetened apple juice I wanted to use up for the water. I did find the spiced batch to be a bit too spicy - slightly overpowering the apple flavor - I think next time I will cut back the amount of spices a bit (personal preference).
When I made the unspiced batch, I made it expressly for the purpose of "jacking" it (aka making apple jack which is a alcohol based brandy type of beverage). It made a very nice hard cider which was enjoyed by all. The left over hard cider was then "jacked" over the winter. The apple jack turned out well too. :-)

I ran my stick blender through the leftover apple solids to finely chop the skins (I had removed the seeds before cooking the apples) and added the solids to a pumpkin quick bread batter I was making.