Chocolate 23. Crab apple

Day 24

Crab apple, Malus sylvestris

This is the wild ancestor to the domesticated apple, although it is very unlikely that many trees you come across when foraging crab apples will actually be pure M sylvestris.  There are thousands of versions of the domesticated apple and they interbreed with the wild, or often what we think of as crab apples are feral trees growing from seeds of discarded fruit.  So there is a great deal of variation in the crab apples you find – some are green, others yellow on ripening, others still go red.  Their size can vary as well, but on the whole they are a sour and small version of the domesticated apple.  Once you have managed the tartness though, they reveal a wonderful apple flavour and are commonly used to make jellies with other wild berries and flavours as they are plentiful and full of pectin.

We have used crab apples in two ways – boiled, pulped and dried – to grind into chocolate, or boiled, pulped and sweetened, then dried to create chewy leathers – a wonderful way to preserve them.  For next year’s Wildbiome 2 project (I will be eating only wild food for 3 months!) I have simply quartered and dried the crab apples and they are like those sour plum sweeties – little chewy nuggets of fruity sourness; I look forward to snacking on these.

For this chocolate, we have simply ground dried crab apple puree into a lovely creamy 55% Honduras milk chocolate from Bare Bones, and then stirred in some finely cut crab apple leather.