Day 21: Crab apple in milk chocolate

Crab apple, Malus sylvestris


We have a local expert on crab apples, Rick Worrall, who has spent many years researching them within Scotland.  He says that it is quite rare to find true crab apples – because there are so many Malus varieties around – in gardens and orchards – both sweet desert apples, and ornamental crab apples, they do a lot of cross breeding over the seasons – and so a true Malus Sylvestris is difficult to find.

Indeed, every single crab apple tree that I know of in this area, produces very different versions of crab apples – small smooth granny smith green round apples, to slightly miniature cox like shapes and colours, a very pleasing round pink one, and a lovely red and yellow, Red delicious shaped apple that is really almost quite sweet.

The classic use for these little feral fruits is to make use of their abundant pectin and combine them with other fruits and herbs to make jellies.  They are rarely eaten for their own sake.  However, once cooked they have good flavour – and sweetened a little, this really comes out.  For the @wildbiome project I had dehydrated small slices of crab apple and they were delicious – a fabulous snack – like little sour sweeties.

For chocolates, I have made leather with the crab apple puree – and coated those in plain chocolate, and for this chocolate, we dried crab apple puree and ground it into the chocolate.  That sharp fruit flavour works really nicely with a milk chocolate – cutting through the richness of the chocolate and helping to sharpen the cocoa flavours

For this one, we have used Bare Bones Honduras 55% milk chocolate – a wonderful combination.

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