The Appeal of Mrs Toogood

Last week’s account of my intrepid expedition to an orchard was read a lot more times than my normal drivel. Obviously, that’s massively flattering but also a bit unnerving. Even if my mum read it even more times than she normally does, there’s probably at least five new punters wondering what the hell they’re wasting their time reading.  If it was accidentally more entertaining than the normal nonsense and you’ve come back expecting a second thrill ride in a row, I can only apologise. To everyone else, don’t worry; soon it’ll just be the four of us again.

Right, back to our usual programming. As I walked to work on Tuesday afternoon past the entirely deserted Covid Testing Centre at the local football stadium, I noticed a bunch of people playing sportsball outside the police station. It was probably one of their community outreach programmes. Lurking near me in the typical left back position of the perennial outsider was a shortish fat lad with his hands in his pockets and scruffy fair hair. Picked last. Never gets the ball. I know the type.

Or rather, to be more accurate, I envy the type.

When I was at school, back in the early eighties, I dreamt of being picked last. Once, or possibly more than once; my memory might be saving me the full extent of my shame, me and my friend Ian were sat in our gym kits waiting for the ritual humiliation of last place in the pick your football team school PE lesson lottery (this was before Ian found a girlfriend, decided there was no real need to use shampoo and then lost a girlfriend, but that’s another story). When everyone else had been picked, a hush descended across the bullytastic changing room. It was Andrew Coolperson’s time to decide which of us he hated least. Obviously, it was a tricky decision. There was an awkward silence that lasted several seconds before the fascist gym teacher clapped his hands, said, “Right lads, that’ll do” and told me and Ian to stay in the changing rooms for the rest of the lesson i.e., all of it.

It turns out we were too crap to be worthy of being picked last. What’s even worse is that we weren’t really disappointed. Ignorant of the shame we were supposed to be feeling, we spent the next hour and ten minutes plotting our ongoing adventures in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. He was a wizard and I was his Dungeon Master. Everyone’s a winner.

And that’s a roundabout way of explaining why I don’t really have any firm opinions about cider. Cider’s the type of drink teenagers drink at parties, or at least they did in my day. Me and Ian had as much chance of being picked last for a party as we did of being picked last in school PE lessons so I can’t be entirely sure. I can still roll a mean d20 though.

You may recall that my last attempt to produce juice from apples resulted in what can only be called failure. Ten kilos of apples, ten drops of apple juice. Since then though, things have got serious. Thanks to a slightly late visit from Father Christmas (thanks Dad), I now have a Finetree Pro Series Apple Crusher. It’s a lime green and bare steel lump of funnel and splintering jaws that can pulp several apples a minute, if not more. According to the official propaganda, pathetic nerds like me should find it easier to squeeze juice from pre-crushed fruit. I’m expecting my cider yield to increase substantially, hopefully even to the point where the juice costs less than twenty quid a pint. I can but dream.

For my first attempt, I stick with the patented (not really) Jack Hargreaves recipe of 40% cooker to 60% eater. In the instructions they bang whole apples into the crusher but I find that to be shockingly inefficient. Instead of falling into the rotating jaws, the apples just bounce around on top and I get nowhere. No worries; I’ll just cut them into chunks.

Cutting apples up is more involved than you might think. I spend the first few minutes trying to identify the best way to cut an apple into eight pieces. Obviously, you start with halves but then do you hold the two halves together and save yourself a cut or just cut crossways into the separated hemisphere? This might not make much difference now when I’ve only got a few to do but when I’m exporting Ticklepenny Scrump/Press (still undecided) across the world, I’ll be doing a lot of cutting. A more efficient technique now could save me weeks later on.

Also, what is the best music to cut apples to? There’s been no scientifically valid research done on the subject. I plump for Jason Isbell on the basis that he’s most likely the best music for pretty much anything. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of him: you’re just dead to me. And you should be ashamed of yourself.

Everything goes swimmingly. The apple pulp coughs up its juice with the barest minimum of effort and I get about five pints of juice from my five kilos of apple. Total cost: about a quid and a bit a pint. Doable.

I neck a pint or two just to check the recipe and I’m over the moon with the result. It tastes just like eating real apples but without all the effort of having to chew.

For my next batch, and the first one to get properly yeasted up, I go with a 40% Bramley to 60% Egremont Russet mix. Slightly less juice this time so I have to head off through the rain to the local greengrocer (annoyingly located right at the top of Steep Hill) and buy some more. The end result is tasty but a bit more expensive.

The cat gets involved at various points so there might be a hint of feline spittle in the finished product but it’s all natural. I still haven’t really solved the brick dust problem so cat gozz (is that still a word?) is the least of my concerns. There are all kinds of well-intentioned internet experts who insist on acidity regulators and purifying agents in your cider but I’m going for a natural approach, by which I mean a zero effort approach. I don’t even sterilise the fermentation vessel. I’m living on the edge. A bit of yeast, a weird curly plastic tube in the top of the jug doing something I don’t really understand and now all I’ve got to do is wait. A few short weeks from now, I’ll be necking the cider I was deprived of as a spotty teenager.