How can I reuse or recycle apple peels & cores?
Frequent commenter on Recycle This, Linda, the bookstorebabe, emailed to tell us about a recipe for using up apple peel and cores:
I just read this on Craftster, about making jelly from the peels and cores of apples. Seems like a nice way to use something that otherwise would be composted. Especially if you’re making apple pie or such like. No, I haven’t tried it yet, but I plan on it! And I follow your website, so just thought I’d pass along the link. The first page has the recipe, the second page has some info I didn’t know about how jelly jells and such.
You have a lovely website – full of so many useful ideas!
Great link, thanks! I love recipes that use up the bits of food usually thrown in the compost bin – especially at the moment when so many people are cooking up gluts of apples.
Another reuse for apple peels is to make apple cider vinegar – either using a wild fermentation method or using cultivated winemaker’s yeast.
We also feed chopped apple peel/cores to our chickens – an indirect way of putting them in the compost really.
Any other suggestions? What do you do with your peels and cores?
Try making cider first. You can easily end up with quality cider, and if it goes wrong then you might find you already have several gallons of cider vinegar – just change the label :-)
I deal with the massive apple glut by chopping all the apples I can find just small enough to go into a cheap electric juicer I got on ebay.
The juicer is surprisingly inefficient at extracting juice, but I can shove the apple chunks in there without removing the cores, and the pulp does get very pulped so I can just squeeze the rest of the juice out with a “muslin bag” (alias some 20p old ladies stockings from Tesco).
The juice is amazing on its own and is good for adding to jellies etc to help them set, but all mine goes to make cider which is really easy to make and really nice to drink *hic*.
You can make your own pectin for other fruit jellies by boiling and straining the juice from apple scraps.
Turn into eggs. You need chickens to achieve.
I eat the peels! I can hardly stop myself! The cores go into my composter :)
Here is an article that also gives 5 good uses for apple skins. Hope you enjoy it! http://tinyurl.com/3mt2q3q