One of the curses of having a bountiful fruit tree or two is that at some point you and your family and your neighbours realise that you’ve eaten enough fresh apples to last you twelve months. Then a couple of weeks later, you realise that your freezer or store cupboard just won’t take any more boxes or jars of stewed apple, no matter how hard you try to cram them in. That’s when you need an escape route. You could try Fruit Share, which is an excellent initiative whereby fruit tree owners who are at their wits end give away spare harvests to those who love cooking spare produce.
Another quick way to preserve the harvest is to slow roast your apples, in the same way as you would slow roast tomatoes, to make an amazingly tangy snack.
All you need to do is to wash your apples, core them, and then slice them into pieces around 2cm thick. They look like little doughnuts. Don’t sprinkle them with sugar: apples have enough in them naturally to caramelise beautifully without your help.
Then place them on a rack on top of a tray and leave in the oven at 150 for half an hour, checking to make sure they are slowly roasting, not burning. Turn the heat down to 100 and leave for an hour and a half, checking every so often.
And that’s it: once you’ve cooked your apples, you’ve got a perfect storable snack which is so marvellously tangy and moreish. It’s perfect for that mid-afternoon slump in the office, or for cheering yourself up on the train on the way to work, or for midnight nibbles, or pre-supper nibbles, or after-supper nibbles, or…
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