APPLES FOR DIFFERENT USES AT GRAVETYE MANOR

In Gravetye’s restaurant, cooking apples are always in demand and Chef likes to save some to use throughout winter. For this we hand pick the highest-quality fruit, and ‘Bramley’ and ‘Blenheim Orange’ are two of the favourites. Both have such characteristic flavours, which only seem to improve with storage. ‘Annie Elizabeth’ has also proved to have excellent flavour and is one of the best for holding its shape with cooking. But even in a busy kitchen there is only so much fruit Chef can get through and so the bulk of our crop is made into juice. This means harvesting our big trees is quite simple as it doesn’t matter if the fruit gets a little bruised. We just lay out a dust sheet or tarpaulin under the tree to keep the fruit clean and shake the apples down. The important thing is to make sure the fruit is totally ripe; the longer it can be left on the tree the better. Once the crop has been gathered, we take it to a local juice maker who can press, bottle and pasteurise the juice for us, which will keep for up to two years. Sometimes we bottle the juice of a single cultivar, but the best juice is a blend of the whole orchard as this is a totally unique flavour of the garden itself. Since the bulk of our crop is intended for juice, most of our young trees are ‘Howgate Wonder’ (left, above), ‘Bramley’ (left, below), ‘Falstaff’ and ‘Blenheim Orange’. These four cultivars blend beautifully to balance sweetness and acidity creating a juice that we are really quite pleased with. We also grow dessert fruit, which are the sweetest, most delicious cultivars, grown within the walls of the kitchen garden as espaliers, step overs and cordons. Good flavour is most important but we also want our fruit to look beautiful. We never want to spray our trees, so we select scab-resistant cultivars. ‘Red Devil’ (right, below) has proved to be an excellent early cultivar, but I prefer the later ones as they often have a richer, more complex flavour. ‘Herefordshire Russet’ was probably the tastiest this season, but ‘Rajka’ (right, above), a Czech apple, was one of the best late performers.