How to Make Apple Cider

Use more than one kind of apple. Divas Can Cook goes in with gala, granny smith and red delicious together, and the sour against the sweet is what gives the cider layers instead of one flat note. A pot of nothing but granny smith comes out sharp. A pot of nothing but red delicious comes out like sugar water.

Leave the skin on and leave the core in. Both carry flavor, and all of it gets strained out at the end anyway, so peeling and coring is work you would throw away. Quarter each apple, or cut it into five or six pieces if it is a big one. Neatness does not matter. These get mashed to pulp in a few hours.

Load the chunks into the crock until it is full. A pot on the stove does the same job, but the slow cooker is the reason this recipe is easy. You fill it, put the lid on and go do something else for the rest of the day.

Pack in more than looks sensible. The apples cook down to well under half their volume, and the more fruit in the pot, the stronger the cider that comes out of it.

Peel the oranges and the lemon, pull them into segments and drop the fruit into the cooker. The peel goes in the bin. She peels them by hand over the board, complaining about it the whole way through, which is fair enough. Peeling oranges is nobody's favorite five minutes.

The citrus is optional and she says so on camera. Leave both out for a straight apple and spice cider with nothing bright in it. What they add is a lift at the back of the sip that stops the sugar sitting heavy.

Run water into the cooker until every piece of fruit is under the surface. Anything poking out above the waterline browns off instead of giving up its flavor to the pot.

Stop as soon as the fruit is covered. Water past that point is dilution, and there is no taking it back out later.

Drop five or six cinnamon sticks across the top of the fruit and scatter whole cloves over them. Sticks, not ground cinnamon. Ground spice never dissolves, so it leaves the cider cloudy and puts silt in the bottom of the mug that survives both strains.

She goes heavy on both because she wants a cider that tastes loudly of cinnamon and clove, and she says as much while she is doing it. Halve the amount if you want the spice sitting behind the apple rather than in front of it.

Lid on, cooker on, walk away. Four hours is the floor she gives. She ran hers for 12 hours overnight and came back to a pot gone soft and deep red the whole way through.

Condensation beading on the inside of the glass lid is the sign it is working. You will smell it long before you look at it, which is most of the reason anyone makes this in the first place.

Take a potato masher to the pot and work your way across it. The apples have gone to mush by now and barely push back. What you are doing is forcing the last of the flavor out of the pulp and into the water around it.

Look for the cinnamon sticks while you are in there. They come out flat, pale and spent, which tells you they gave the pot everything they had.

Drape a large piece of cheesecloth over a pot with plenty hanging over the sides, then pour the mashed apples into the middle of it. The liquid runs straight through and the pulp stays behind in the cloth.

Gather the corners, lift the bundle clear of the pot and squeeze. A real amount of cider is still trapped in that pulp and squeezing is the only way to get it out. Keep going until the stream slows to a drip.

Set a fine mesh sieve over a pitcher and run the cider through a second time. This is the pass that matters. One strain takes the pulp out. Two strains take the grit out.

Skip it and you get cider that looks muddy in the glass and leaves sediment at the bottom of it. She strains twice on purpose and says why: she does not want chunks in it.

Taste it before you sweeten it. Right now it tastes like apple cinnamon water, thin and a little dull. That is normal and it is not a sign anything went wrong.

White sugar goes in, then a splash of vanilla extract, then brown sugar. The brown sugar is what moves it from sweet to warm, and the vanilla takes the edge off what the cloves left behind. She adds a lot because she likes a sweet cider. Put in half, stir, taste, and work up from there.

Drop a cinnamon stick and a couple of thin apple slices into the bottom of each glass, then pour the cider over them. Steaming hot is the classic. Over ice is the right answer on a warm October afternoon, and it holds up both ways.

What is left keeps about a week in the fridge in a covered pitcher. Reheat a mug at a time rather than bringing the whole batch back up to temperature over and over, which dulls the spice a little each round.