Having grown up in New England, I remember making candy coated apples using a sticky caramel sauce. Worse, I recall eating store-bought ones with harder, red-dye candy coatings. Also, bobbing for apples was a thing. Apparently, parents were unconcerned about "germs" back then, with multiple kids plunging their faces into pots of water trying to bite an apple. Maybe that's why kids were healthier then than now?
Recently, we discovered something, by accident, that at least explains the candy-coated apple thing. It came about when we were making cider syrup. Never heard of it? That's because it's too amazing, and if people knew about it, they'd all quit work and skip school and hang around making and eating cider syrup day and night and all of society would tumble into the suspended animation of blissful enjoyment.
There are two ways to make cider syrup. First, the easy way: Simply pour several gallons of cider into a big pot and simmer it down until it forms a syrup. We don’t do it that way. We have way too many apples from the tress in our “yarden” (and no cider press).
We make cider syrup from whole apples. They can be pristine whole apples, half-rotten drops, wormy apples, whatever. You don’t have to skin or core the apples. If an apple has a bad spot, cut it out. Bruised? Ignore and throw that in. Wormy? Core it. You need to process a lot of apples, so don’t be all day about it. Put the good apples and semi-cleaned chunks all in your biggest pots and place them in the oven to bake overnight at a low temp, like 220°. Cook them for 2 hours or 8 hours, with a lid on or off, it hardly matters.
All your pots have plastic handles? Cook your apples on the stovetop, but add a tiny amount of water covering the bottom of the pans to start. (In the oven, no water required.)
At the end they should look melted.
Next, use a flat-bottomed colander and press down on the apples in the pot until the liquid comes out. Here is a video of me doing that.
Pour the liquid into a saucepan and press again. Repeat until you tire of this, or no more liquid comes out. The main point is to get only liquid, no pulp.
The pulp can be put in the compost or fed to the pigs. Or, if you want to work even harder, put it through a jelly cone (aka a Chinois) to remove the seeds and skins. Put the clean, processed pulp back in the oven, now in shallow baking pans (we use our glass lasagna pan, pie plates, and anything else we can find), and set it back in the oven at 220° for many more hours. Stir this occasionally as it turns into a caramelized velvety brown apple butter – less sweet than if you had not extracted the liquid first, but still an incredible treat and maybe better in some ways, more a food than a dessert. It's a pre-biotic with great fiber, super healthy for you and gets the big smile from your inner biome.
The liquid goes into a heavy-bottomed saucepan on the stove top to be slowly simmered down. Stir it occasionally to keep an even consistency. The best cider syrup comes from a mix of as many apple varieties as you can find, combining sweet and tart. After volume is reduced to 50 - 75% from where you started, you have syrup. Put it in clean jars with tight lids, let it cool and place in the fridge. Syrup lasts for weeks even after you break the seal and start using it. Drink it by the shot, add it to mixed drinks, put fizzy water in it, put it on pancakes, muffins, pork chops, ribs, yogurt, or vanilla ice cream. mmmMMMM!
BUT… if you have time and patience… KEEP GOING. I turned it off and left the pan of cider syrup on the stove overnight. The next day, I turned the burner on again, so it would be hot to put in the jars. But I was too busy to make that happen, and then it turned itself into the most amazing apple jelly. The next time I do this, I'll remember that as it gets thicker, I need to stir it more and more often. Still, this apple jelly was not like anything I’ve ever tasted. Its texture is not like sugar-and-pectin jellies. It’s indescribably good.
You can even KEEP GOING after that. But you’d better be stirring it a lot, and at the end don’t walk away from it at all. It’s now the most amazing apple candy. No need to add sugar or spices, apples are both sweet and spicy enough on their own. If you can resist devouring the whole mess while standing in a stupor at the stove, I suggest grabbing a few of your very best apples that you saved for eating. Even better if you thought to put them in the fridge while boiling down the syrup. Roll these cold hard fruits in the warm, sticky apple candy. The coating will harden on the chilled apple.
So now you might suspect, as I do, that the original candied apples were in fact coated with dark, red, irresistibly delicious cider candy. I know you're expecting a picture of this stage, but I totally forgot the world existed for a while there... oops. Next year, I promise.
