The apples came from an orchid in Southern NH. My wife has read so much about food born illness that she won't touch apple cider and for a while she wouldn't even look at a hamburger. Now she will eat a well done burger. She feels the apples can be contaminated in many ways. If they are drops and have come in contact with wild animal droppings or if the pickers don't use good hygene in the fields. So I wanted to save the cyder from a date with the sink drain by pasturizing it. Thanks for the help.
David
Know what you mean. If one starts to think of all the possible contamination sources on our food, let alone the sources where we touch things that other people have touched without washing their hands, etc. it can be a scary world. I dislike the racoons that crap on my wood pile, then I bring the wood in the house and have to handle it and breathe the dust from it. Racoons are not the clean animals that some tout them to be. But in 35 years burning wood, no apparent harm done yet.
One of my pet peeves is a public bathroom with no paper towels, only an air dryer. Most people nowadays don't wash their hands anyway, but do grab the door handle on the way out (at least when the door only opens in). You wash, but cannot dry, but have to grab that same door handle - so much for clean hands. I usually take a few napkins in with me, and use them to dry and to grab the door handle on the way out. Real picky, huh? [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]
Good luck with the pasturization of the cider, and getting your wife to drink it.
David:
Wine is not pasturized either. Hard cider and wine are treated with sulfites to kill foreign yeasts, etc. I suppose the alcohol/acidity would kill anything else. For regular cider, we just wash the apples before we press them in our already washed press, then freeze the cider.
Bob
I don't think it's necessary to bring the cider to a boil. Milk isn't boiled during the pasteurization process. I think I read that the temperature necessary to pasteurize a liquid is about 150 degrees F. Hold it at that temperature for perhaps 20 minutes and it should be safe. Boiling it would probably not do the flavor any good.
From what I have read it would be hard for any harmful organisms to live in apple cider vinegar.
From what I have read it would be hard for any harmful organisms to live in apple cider vinegar.
"Raw" vinegar - unpasteurized - is touted to be superior for medicinal and personal hygiene as well as food use and for good reason. Pasteurization, which is simply subjecting a product to heat, destroys heat sensitive vitamins and enzymes. Raw vinegar is quite expensive in comparison to pasteurized vinegar, but for personal and internal uses, it's worth the extra cost
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