Cider

There are a few avenues that can be used to justify the brewing of cider... The fact that the colleges alcohol ban has just been lifted, I come from the west country so it's almost mandatory, we were given a crate of pairs for free or the fact that brewing alcohol has been a tradition within Christian institutes  for centuries. But the fact that it is just an interesting/amusing thing to do was probably a more significant factor in this evenings activities.

It takes a surprisingly short amount of time to conceptualise, plan and execute the production of cider. From the discovery that a crate of pears was up for grabs to sealed jars of pear juice waiting to ferment was no more than an hour. Tidy work for a Wednesday evening.

While making cider is an art form; developed, tweaked and perfected by professionals (monks) over the years it is actually very simple to make a plain old brew. With a 5 minute google search it is easy to find a recipe that involves less than 3 ingredients (results may vary)

Of course when a whole crate of fruit presents itself, it comes with the opportunity to experiment! For the first batch we decided to go purist - no added yeast, nothing fancy just pear juice and touch of sugar... okay a fist full of sugar.

Things seemed to go our way, we happened upon an old juicer (it required a thorough cleaning) which saved us the curfuffle of pressing the pears by hand. In hindsight it would have probably been a pretty spectacular fail if we hadn't found the juicer.

Juicing pretty much anything tends to leave one in possession of rather a lot of pulp, we have thought about it a bit and a few ideas have been banded about including pear flavored home made sausages, pear jam, pear cake?! Anyway if you have a good idea for what to do with it and better still if you can provide proper instructions/ recipe then maybe we will make it ... maybe.

Until then David is going to have to figure out a green solution for disposing of it.

This is the slightly disgusting-looking result of 'juicing' the pairs... then just to sieve and store it

In other news our South African got bored of waiting and raided our warm dry cupboard full of meat ... the results were rather enjoyable...

So now you can know that the instructions in my previous post do actually result in delicious biltong. We now have room to experiment with some more exotic recipes.

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