Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Using Unripe Apples




One year  I made a mistake on when to harvest the apples.  I thought they were green apples and so harvest them only to find out that, no, they are most likely Galas.  So  I had two huge five gallon buckets filled with green unripe apples!  I couldn't even consider just throwing them out, what a waste!   But searching around my books I did not find one recipe for unripe apples.  Then I started researching it on the internet and found that you can use them for apple jelly.  In fact unripe apples contain much more pectin (which aids in jelling) than ripe apples so this would be a good use for them.  I processed them just as you would regular apples by first making juice from them and then getting on with the jelly process.

My only change was that although the recipe said to just cut them up core and all into the pot to make the juice I cut out the core for a few reasons.  You should know that apple seeds contain natural cyanide that can poison a person if, say, you ate like forty apples including cores in one sitting. So with that in mind I did the following.  First these apples are much smaller than store bought due to being under-ripe so you would have many more core to apple ratio than in a standard recipe upping possible cyanide, also the seeds themselves would be less mature and soft so much more likely to leach the cyanide into the boiling juice, third much of the cores were infested with worms so I just cut them out.  By the way never feed whole apples to rabbits!  They eat the seeds and die from cyanide poisoning!  We had this happen once!


Everything worked fine and now I have 10 pints of apple jelly.  It tastes like it should and I will use it on toast or to glaze ham, chicken, or pork chops.

This would be a very good way to use up green apples that fall to the ground before their time.

15 comments:

  1. Very cool! Jealous of all your apple trees. Next year you'll have a wonderful harvest. Of RIPE apples at that!

    ReplyDelete
  2. MMMMMMM!!!! I miss my big apple trees! You are sooo lucky!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Wow, thanks - I just Googled "what to do with thousands of little unripe apples" and you were the first hit! I have no choice but to pick mine early because the squirrels and crows attack our apples as soon as they show the slightest tinge of red. We had hundreds of apples on our other trees and literally did not get one single apple for ourselves. But our Lady Apple tree ripens later (or, would ripen, if the pests would leave them alone) and I maybe I can get some use out of the apples this way. I look forward to sitting on the porch eating toast with apple jelly and saying bad words to all the critters in the yard.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm so glad I could help! Let me know how it turns out!

      Delete
  4. Thanks so much!
    My husband may use some to make pepper jelly

    ReplyDelete
  5. We to recently bought a new home with an apple tree that has not been pruned. We have scheduled somebody to come in and prune it and with your recipe I can now harvest the pruned apples before they're ripe as well as start harvesting some of the low hanging fruit now. Thanks

    ReplyDelete
  6. Great information, Sarah. That's good to know about the rabbits since my parents have a pet rabbit and I think they might feed it apples....I will have to share this with them. Thanks a bunch for sharing with Roses of Inspiration.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just don't feed it the seeds

      Delete
    2. Just don't feed the rabbit the seeds. Fruit oK.

      Delete
  7. Good information to know and your jelly came out looking wonderful. Thank you for sharing with the Clever Chicks Blog Hop! I hope you’ll join us again next week!

    Cheers,
    Kathy Shea Mormino
    The Chicken Chick
    http://www.The-Chicken-Chick.com

    ReplyDelete
  8. You can also make pectin to can for later use. Just do a search for homemade pectin for instructions.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Thank you Renaissance Mom for this.I just finished canning five gallons of blackberries and that same afternoon, I was "gifted" with twelve lbs of unripe apples. What to do? Now that I've learned how to use the internet, I typed in 'unripe apples' and yr site came straight up. Two of us, me at 64 and a friend at 76 sat outside under the trees and cored all these apples because we know we may can apple jelly. My thanks to you is: you may give the jelly a pink tinge with dried rose petals. Lovely with toast!

    ReplyDelete

I love to hear from my readers!