The first bag of apples is lovely.
You put them in a bowl. You eat one standing at the kitchen counter. You make a crumble at the weekend and feel thoroughly pleased with autumn.
The second bag is still welcome.
By the third, you are looking at 7kg of slightly irregular apples in a supermarket carrier and wondering whether accepting them was a mistake.
This is the peculiar economy of British apple season. A productive tree can generate far more fruit than one household wants to eat, so apples begin moving around the neighbourhood: over fences, into offices, onto village hall tables and into the hands of anyone foolish enough to say, “Oh yes, we love apples.”
The temptation is to respond by embarking on a preserving project. You do not have to.
The useful thing is to deal with the bag once, properly, before the apple at the bottom goes soft and takes several of its neighbours with it.
First, empty the bag
Do not leave a large quantity of apples sitting in the bag they arrived in.
Tip them gently onto a table and sort them into three rough groups.
The best apples are firm and sound, without bruises, broken skin or signs of rot. These are your candidates for eating fresh or storing.
The use-soon apples might be perfectly edible but won't store well. Perhaps they've been knocked during picking, are already very ripe or simply belong to an early variety that was never designed to sit around until Christmas.
Anything mouldy or rotten goes. Don't turn obviously spoiled fruit into juice or apple sauce on the theory that the bad bit can simply be chopped off. Mouldy or damaged apples can contain patulin, a toxin associated particularly with mould in apples and apple products.
That initial ten minutes of sorting is probably the most useful thing you can do with the whole bag.
You may not need to do anything to the good ones
People have been storing apples for a very long time without turning them into chutney first.
The important qualification is that not every apple is a storage apple. Early varieties generally need eating fairly quickly, while many later varieties can last for weeks or months. The RHS suggests mid-season apples may keep for around four to eight weeks, while suitable late-season varieties can last several months under good conditions.
If you know what variety you've been given, look it up. If the donor describes it only as “the one from the big tree by the shed”, you'll have to work with what you've got.
Choose the firmest, cleanest, unblemished fruit, preferably with stalks intact.
A cool, dark, frost-free and well-ventilated shed, garage or cellar can work well. The RHS gives 4–7°C as a suitable storage range and recommends laying apples carefully in a single layer, ideally without them touching. Slatted trays, shallow boxes or the moulded fruit trays that greengrocers sometimes discard are all useful.
Then comes the bit people forget: check them.
An apple store is not a retirement home where you wave goodbye in October and return at Christmas. Have a look through regularly and remove fruit that is deteriorating. One rotten apple really can cause trouble for the rest.
If you don't have a suitable cool space, don't create an elaborate apple-storage facility unless this is going to become an annual event. Keep what you can realistically eat and move the rest into the freezer or kitchen.
The freezer is probably more useful than 14 jars of chutney
There is a persistent idea that dealing with a glut must involve jars.
It doesn't.
If what you actually make during winter is crumble, pie, sponge and stewed fruit, the most useful form of preserved apple is often simply apple ready to cook.
Peel and core the sound apples, then slice or chop them according to the things you normally make. Freeze the pieces spread out on trays or plates first, then transfer them once frozen to labelled freezer bags or containers. Freezing changes the texture, so don't expect a thawed dessert apple to regain its original crunch, but that hardly matters when it is heading underneath crumble topping. The RHS specifically recommends frozen apples for subsequent cooking and baking.
Better still, cook a large pan of plain apple.
You need very little: chopped apple, a splash of water to stop it catching at the beginning and perhaps some sugar if the fruit genuinely needs it. Cook until soft.
Then stop.
Don't automatically add cinnamon. Don't turn all of it into dessert. Plain cooked apple is far more useful because you can decide what it is later.
Freeze it in quantities your household will actually use.
A small tub can become porridge topping. A larger one can become crumble or pie filling. It can go into a simple apple cake, be served with yoghurt or be sweetened and spiced when you finally know what you want from it.
The aim is not to preserve apples in their most impressive form. It is to make February-you glad that October-you bothered.
Make one crumble now, obviously
There is no need to become so ruthlessly efficient that you forget why somebody gave you the apples.
A crumble remains one of the best destinations for fruit that is a little knocked about but otherwise sound, particularly sharp cooking apples.
You do not need a special apple-crumble shopping expedition. Peel and slice enough apples to fill your dish, sweeten according to how tart they are, then cover them with your usual crumble mixture. If you don't have a usual mixture, roughly twice as much flour as butter, with sugar to taste, will get you into perfectly respectable crumble territory.
Oats, chopped nuts or a little spice are optional. None is a moral requirement.
And if you've been given dessert apples rather than cookers, taste before adding much sugar. Some collapse beautifully; others keep their shape. A mixture of varieties can actually make a better crumble than fruit selected for uniformity.
Apple sauce does not have to mean pork
Calling it apple sauce rather undersells what is essentially a tub of useful cooked fruit.
Leave it chunky and spoon it over porridge. Stir it into plain yoghurt. Use it in a fool. Warm it and put it beside pancakes. Add cinnamon later and serve it with ice cream. Use sharper apple sauce alongside roast pork, sausages or a good piece of cheddar.
If you've frozen it unsweetened, it hasn't committed itself to pudding.
This is a small point, but an important one when you're trying to use a glut: preserve ingredients rather than creating 12 finished products you may not actually want.
Drying is worthwhile if you already own the equipment
If you have a dehydrator, apples are one of the better reasons to switch it on.
Core them, slice them evenly and dry according to your machine's instructions until properly dried throughout. They shrink dramatically, which is useful when the original problem is essentially volume.
They are good in packed lunches, chopped into porridge and muesli, or eaten directly from the container every time you walk past it.
Would we buy a dehydrator solely because somebody has arrived with a carrier bag of Bramleys? No.
Juice makes sense when the quantities become silly
There is a point at which domestic peeling ceases to be a sensible use of an afternoon.
If you have boxes rather than bags, look for an orchard, community apple day, cider maker or local pressing service that accepts people's fruit. Availability varies enormously by area, but pressing can turn an intimidating quantity of sound apples into something much easier to distribute.
Do ask what the service requires before turning up. Some operate only on certain dates, some have minimum quantities and arrangements for bottles or pasteurisation vary.
And be selective about the fruit. Apples destined for juice should be sound, not the mouldy specimens rejected from the fruit bowl. Patulin contamination is particularly associated with mouldy apples and apple juice.
Home cider is another possibility, but it is a hobby rather than an emergency disposal method. If you have never fermented anything before, a rapidly softening bag of apples is not a compelling reason to begin tonight.
Chutney is excellent. Fourteen jars of chutney are a commitment.
Apple chutney earns its place because sharp apples work so well with vinegar, onions, sugar and spice, and a few jars are genuinely useful with cheese, cold meats and pork pies.
But preserving should solve a surplus, not relocate it.
Before making a vast batch, consider how much chutney you ate last year. If the answer is half a jar, act accordingly.
The same goes for apple jelly. It can be wonderful, particularly if you're dealing with small, tart apples, but there is no prize for converting one inconvenient quantity of fruit into another inconvenient quantity of preserves.
If you do bottle or preserve food for room-temperature storage, use a properly tested recipe from a reputable source rather than improvising the proportions or processing method. The Food Standards Agency advises particular care with home-preserved foods and recommends following reputable preserving guidance. Reused jam jars should be sound, properly washed and sterilised before use.
Don't forget savoury food
Apple's natural destination is not always beneath custard.
Sharp apples are useful anywhere you want sweetness and acidity together. Fry slices with onions to serve with sausages. Add chunks to a tray of roast pork. Put finely sliced crisp apple into a cabbage slaw. Add it to a cheese sandwich. Cook it down with onions as the beginning of something to eat with roast meat.
This is particularly helpful when everyone in the house has reached the stage at which the words “I've made an apple cake” no longer produce the expected enthusiasm.
And you are allowed to give some away again
There is no rule saying a gift of produce must reach its final destination with you.
If you have been given far more than you can sensibly use, keep what you want and move the rest along while the fruit is still good.
Put a box outside with a FREE APPLES sign. Take some to work. Ask a neighbour. Offer them through a local community group. If there is a community fridge nearby, check what fresh produce it accepts and how donations should be made.
The important part is doing this while you still have good apples to give away, rather than waiting until generosity has turned into compost.
There is something rather pleasing about the informal circulation of garden produce. One household has too many apples; another has no apple tree at all. Later it might be courgettes, runner beans or an alarming number of plums.
Just don't take the carrier bag back to the person who gave it to you.
They almost certainly have another one waiting.
The five-minute apple plan
If a bag has just appeared in your kitchen and you don't want to think about it again today:
- Tip it out. Leaving bruised fruit buried at the bottom won't improve matters.
- Put aside perfect, firm apples for eating or storage.
- Deal with sound but short-lived fruit first: eat it, cook it or freeze it.
- Discard mouldy or rotten apples rather than juicing or saucing them.
- Give away the excess now, while somebody else will still be pleased to receive it.
That is enough. Nobody is required to make chutney.