APPLE CIDER FRAPPE

Discovering the Apple Cider Frappe

If you have read any of our apple recipes you probably know that one of my favorite places to be is in an apple orchard during apple season. I like everything about it, especially picking the apples. I wrote about it in Apple Picking Time. It was during one of my weekday retreats to the orchard that I was introduced to the cider frappe.

The farm store at my local apple orchard is packed with sweet treats. They have homemade fudge to die for and fresh baked goods of all kinds including cider donuts. There’s homemade bread too. Not just for sale, they use it to make sandwiches stuffed with their own oven baked turkey and ham. They even have homemade ice cream.

Once I go in it’s impossible for me to leave without thousands of calories packed into a small bag. The bag cleverly disguises the guilty pleasures within by displaying a big red apple on the front. It looks so harmless to the unknowing eye.

The farm store is my kind of place.

A newly added taste treat delight

One afternoon while checking out some sweet treats at the farm store I saw they had something new on their menu board. A beverage called a cider frappe. I am a frappe lover so I asked for the scoop on the cider frappe (pun intended 😉).

I was the only customer in the store and the gal at the counter was one of the family members that owned and lived on the farm. She said the cider frappe was something they were trying out. She offered to share one with me if I wanted to try it. Oh yes please!

She poured some of their fresh pressed cider into a blender mixing cup. Then she scooped some homemade vanilla ice cream and added it to the cider. She turned the blender on and in moments she handed me this creamy, frothy cider delicacy. OMG! Dangerously good.

Cider Stories

The cider I buy at my local orchard is unpasteurized. You can only buy unpasteurized cider when you are buying directly from the farm.

All distributed cider has to be pasteurized which means it has been heated to kill bacteria. There is not a huge difference in taste, but there can be an unexpected twist of fate with unpasteurized cider. It happened to me and it could happen to you. 😱

A Halloween surprise

For many years I hosted a big Halloween party for all the neighborhood kids. As the crowd of kids grew over the years we added new spooky and fun stuff to entice our older kids to keep coming. It took most of the month of October to prepare for our annual event and I loved it.

One day in early October, on one of my weekday orchard retreats I decided I would cross one chore off the party list and I bought a couple of gallons of their unpasteurized cider. I planned on keeping the cider in an outdoor shed. Because it was October in northern New England and there was more than a little nip in the air I assumed the cider would keep well until party day in the unheated shed.

On the day of the party I went to get the two jugs of cider out of the shed. The plastic bottles had swollen up like balloons ready to pop. Yup, I had 2 gallons of fermented hard cider!

The kids at the party didn’t have cider that year.

But all was not lost

I had a neighbor whose alcohol of choice was hard cider. Their loss was his gain.

Real cider’s seasonal sweetness

Here’s an interesting fact I learned while hanging out in apple orchards.

Because I buy cider from the farm throughout the several weeks of apple harvest time I’ve discovered that cider always tastes sweeter toward the end of the season. One year I asked the grower if there is a reason for this or was I just imagining it. He explained that many of the apple varieties that ripen last are sweeter than those that ripen at the beginning of the season so those apples will make a sweeter cider!

Such a simple answer. I wish there were more of those in life.

Nothing is easier than making your own Cider Frappe

Here’s the making of my first cider frappe of the year

This sweet treat has some redeeming value. It is not a low calorie drink, but it has a heck of a lot of vitamins and minerals. Check out our nutritional information on the recipe card. It’s almost a health drink 😋. Well almost.

One thing is for sure, it’s a lot better for you than a bottle of soda!

The Ingredients

Use only the real thing

Making your cider frappe from anything other than real pressed apple cider is not going to give you the special slightly tart flavor that gives this drink it’s unique character.

Cider

In season fresh pressed apple cider

Ice cream

Use vanilla ice cream, caramel swirl, butter rum or any other ice cream that pairs well with apples.

How Much

You don’t need to follow our recipe of 10 ounces of cider with 1/3 cup ice cream.

Make it your way. You can’t go wrong.

You can make your cider frappe really thick with mostly ice cream using the cider to flavor it. Or yours can be mostly cider with just enough ice cream to make it creamy. Make it half and half or anything in between. It’s all good!

Mix it up

If you have a food processor or a blender you can whip it up in that.

If you have an emulsion blender it works great for a single serving or two!

You can put the cider and ice cream in a jar with a cover and shake it up and drink it right from the jar.

Or mix the cider and ice cream together in a bowl and whip it with a whisk.

You don’t need to fully emulsify the ice cream. Lumps are good!

Do you know what an emulsion blender is? We have one pictured in BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP. An emulsion blender is a long handled electric blender. The blades are encased at the bottom of the handle. It’s great for blending beverages like our cider frappe. It’s a fairly inexpensive tool that comes in handy for soups and sauces as well as mixed beverages.

Or don’t mix .. just scoop

You can just scoop some ice cream into a glass of cider with out mixing it in. That is delicious too.

I call that a Cider Soda.

Here’s one of each .. a cider frappe and a cider soda

Other Ideas

Add some cinnamon, nutmeg or apple pie spice to the cider or over the top of the frappe

Stir in a little spiced rum or apple liqueur