Cider Chews and Goos
or, how to conquer your caramel fears and learn to season your sweets
It’s October. In my part of the world, October means we’ll be eating apples...until May. Maybe it’s hard to get excited about apples? We take them for granted because they are now shipped all over the globe and available year round. It’s also hard to do anything truly NEW with apples. That’s because they’re the perfect baking fruit—generations of cooks have done centuries of autumnal tinkering and passed down the best techniques. Generations of growers and grafters and foragers have cultivated hundreds (thousands?!) of varietals. Depending on the type they can be crisp or tender raw, silky or gelatinous cooked. Some varieties taste eerily like raspberries or grapes or roses. And the best baking apples have plenty of tartness and pectin, two qualities always welcome in desserts.
In this set of recipes we’re working with apple cider, arguably even less appreciated than the humble apple. Around here, it shows up in grocery stores starting in September.1 Maybe you dutifully buy a half gallon or two to celebrate fall, maybe it gets puffy and fizzy and a little boozy in the back of your fridge. But don’t underestimate it—contained within that liquid are the same appley qualities we love, acidity and pectin, we just have to concentrate it. And with this reduced cider elixir, we can confidently enter the world of caramel. Caramel and candy-making can sound scary, but starting with cider helps bypass the typical pitfalls (crystallization and cloying sweetness), and you can make something delicious and, dare I say, exciting without breaking a sweat.
