How Can It Be Fall Without the Fair?

For 42 years the Common Ground Country Fair has been the corner stone of our fall. Every day in September was carefully mapped out in advance so that John could travel the state collecting apples as they ripened for his famous apple display at the Fedco Trees tent. To prepare for the Fair took long days, late nights and many miles, but the preparation wasn’t nearly as exhausting or intense as the three days of the Fair. CGCF was where we learned new things, visited with old friends we only got to see once a year, talked apples for three days straight, froze in the wind, sweltered in the sun, drank cup after cup of Chai Wallah tea, marveled at the vegetables in the Exhibition Hall, hid away for an hour in the music tent to listen to the Gawlers sing and fiddle, wore the same t-shirt as 100’s of other volunteers, and always remembered why we live in Maine.

But this year is different. Like so many things, this tradition that we know and love is not going to look the same. Next weekend, the Common Ground Country Fair will be neither common nor on the ground, but virtual. There will be no apple display or chai, you won’t be able to catch up with your friends from the County, nor will you freeze or bake when the weather turns. But you will be able to watch demos, hear music, participate in a baked-bean make-along, learn to fix a flat on your bike, buy one of those t-shirts that volunteers will be wearing, and learn how to id an apple with John (at 1:00 PM on Friday). All this and much more without having to wait in a line of traffic. So check out the live-streaming CGCF this Friday-Sunday. We hope to “see” you there.

Picks of the week:
(Click each variety for more info)

Canadian Strawberry

Chestnut Crab

Red Free

St. Lawrence

Wealthy

Whitney Crab

2020 is turning out to be the year of the Crabs. Never before have we been able to offer four different crabapple varieties in one season. Crabs are always our most requested apples so we hope you enjoy the bounty. The two this week, Whitney and Chestnut, look enough alike that we packed each in its own bag. While their size and coloring are similar, their tastes are very different. Whitney is floral and fills your mouth with the essence of tropical fruits. There is some hard-to-detect tartness there that keeps the sweetness in check so that each bite seems a perfectly balanced flavor burst. In contrast Chestnut is dripping with honey, pear and vanilla. There’s even a bit of nuttiness there although we admit that it might just be the power of suggestion that makes us think that. We can imagine Chestnut pairing well with blue cheese and walnuts in a salad or on its own. If you want other ways to use crabapples check out these recipes for fruit leathers, slow-roasted baby apples and pickled crabs.

Ancient Wealthy tree that still bears fruit

So enough about those tiny apples - we can’t forget about the rest of the varieties in your share. The two old favorites that we offer most years, St. Lawrence and Wealthy, have been grown in Maine since the 19th century. Both are lemony tart, have skin and flesh that is easy to eat and almost foamy in your mouth, and are crisp without being snappy. You can take a bite of one of these apples in the middle of a movie without disturbing the person next to you. Both make great sauce.

We have always considered Wealthy to be an excellent pie apple, but Rowan Jacobson in his book Apples of Uncommon Character threw down the gauntlet when he questioned Wealthy’s place in the pie hall of fame. That sent John straight to the kitchen to make his patented, single variety apple pie. The OOAL crew tried it this afternoon after packing apples. The verdict - the apples got soft but not soupy, the crust fell a little but not disastrously, and the flavor tasted just like the apple pie of our imagination. In the end we ate almost the entire pie in one sitting.

There is one other old apple in your share, Canadian Strawberry. Unlike St. Lawrence and Wealthy, we know of only one place in Maine, where it was grown - on the Davis homestead in Solon. We love this apple for fresh eating and can’t imagine why it wasn’t more widespread. But then again the old timers were less interested in apples they could eat out of hand and more interested in those that they could preserve or store for the winter months ahead.

To round out the offerings we’ve included another hard-to-find modern apple, Redfree, that has the snap and sweetness that we’ve come to expect from the university breeding programs. It also makes a nice, mild sauce.

Our apples come to you straight from the tree, so, as with all fresh produce, please be sure to wash them thoroughly before eating. Some of the apples are grown using Integrated Pest Management by the orchards we collaborate with throughout Maine, and some are organically grown here on Super Chilly Farm.

What is a Crabapple?

All apples are members of the genus Malus. There are currently fifty recognized species of Malus in the world. These species developed within populations of apples that grew in isolation from one another for hundreds of thousands of years. All are native to the northern hemisphere. Four species are native to North America, while the other 46 are native to Europe and Asia. All, except one, bear small fruit under 2” in diameter that botanists refer to as “crabapples”.

This means that all apple species, with one exception, are crabs. The one large-fruited apple species is Malus sieversii, the native apple of the mountains of Kazakhstan. This species is in the ancestry of all the apple varieties that we eat that are larger than 2”. As humans and apples developed their partnership over the last few thousand years, the classification of apple species got complicated. When our ancestors traveled across Asia and around the world, they took apples with them. Apples are promiscuous and like to have sex with other apples, regardless of species. The result has been that most apples —including all of those on the grocery store shelves or in your OOAL delivery this week—are “hybrids” that include the genes of several species.

The word crabapple may have its origins in Scandinavia as Skrabba. People think of crabapples as bad-tasting or strictly ornamental; and indeed some are “spitters”. But many small-fruited apples pack a flavor punch that belies their diminutive size. One of our favorites is Wickson which we hope to have for you later this fall. We love it for fresh eating and for pressing into a single variety hard cider. Other crabs are strictly for the birds - like the Sargent Crabapple in our yard that attracts flocks of Cedar Waxwings each winter looking for a snack. Although every crab is a unique blend of assorted species, all of them have one thing in common: they all are under 2” in diameter.

Recipe of the Week

I was defrosting and reorganizing my freezer last week when I discovered a bag of cranberries lurking somewhere near the bottom under the strawberries and frozen peas. Who knows how many Thanksgivings ago I dropped it down in there. But since the cranberries still looked red and weren’t coated in ice crystals, I carefully moved the bag up closer to the top of the freezer where i had a greater chance of running into it again. As luck would have it, when I was searching for a pie recipe to use for my own personal does-Wealthy-make-a-good-pie challenge, I came across a recipe that called for both apples and cranberries. Perfect. I had a new recipe to try, and Icould create a little more space in my over-crowded freezer.

So it turns out that this pie is delicious. I think it would be good with most any apple, but the Wealthy softened just the right amount to provide a pleasing contrast to the crunch of the walnuts. The cranberry flavor was more dominant than the apple, but the apple mellowed out the cranberry for sure. Friends who were glamping in our driveway over the weekend ate some with their campfire dinner and then requested it again for their campfire breakfast. Don’t wait til Thanksgiving to give this a try.

Cranberry Apple Pie with Walnut Crumb Topping

(from Ken Haedrich”s Apple Pie)

Ingredients

1 single-crust pie pastry

Filling

6 cups apples - cored and sliced 1/4” thick
2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
1/2 cup walnuts - chopped
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup maple syrup
11/2 TBS fresh lemon juice
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
3 TBS flour

Topping

1 cup walnuts
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup light brown sugar - firmly packed
3/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup cold, unsalted butter - cut into 1/4” pieces

Josh giving the thumbs up to a good day harvesting apples

Directions

Prepare the pie pastry, and refrigerate until it is firm enough to roll.
Remove pastry from the refrigerator, and roll out on a piece of floured, waxed paper into a 131/2” circle. Transfer into a 9”, deep-dish pie pan. Fold the edges under and crimp into a standing ridge around the edge. Chill in the freezer for at least 30 minutes.
Mix the apples, cranberries, walnuts and sugar together in a large bowl. Let stand for 10 minutes.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Add the remaining filling ingredients to the bowl. Shake the flour over the ingredients at the end, and mix in. Turn the filling into the frozen pie shell, and even it out. Place the pie on a baking sheet covered with foil, and place on the center oven rack. Bake for 35 minutes.
To make the crumb topping, briefly pulse the walnuts and sugar in the bowl of a food processor. Add the flour and salt; pulse again. Remove the lid and scatter the butter pieces over the dry ingredients. Pulse the machine until the mixture resembles medium-fine crumbs. Transfer to a mixing bowl, and rub the crumbs between your fingers to make buttery clumps. Chill.
After 35 minutes, remove the pie from the oven, and turn down the temperature to 375 degrees.
Dump the topping over the center of the pie, and spread it out to the edges so that it is evenly distributed across the pie. Tamp down lightly. Return the pie to the oven and bake until the juices start to bubble and the topping begins to brown - 35-45 minutes more. Place a piece of loose foil over the top if it begins to get too dark.
Cool for at least an hour before slicing (if you can wait).