Using a garden shredder as an apple scratter

scratter - Urban Dictionary Miserable ignorant track-suit wearing trash exemplifying the s*it- encrusted population of the British Isles. Abusive dole-scum. The reason today's elderly would rather starve away in their own homes than take a 50- yard trip down to the shops. See also scally and scut-dog.

What's your definition?

Oh dear. I think you may have missed the word "apple"

No I didn't but I still don't know the meaning of scratter in relation to apples or anything else. Is it a regional dialect word? Northern British perhaps whereas I'm southern British.

May I suggest you use "apple scratter" with the quotation marks in Google and you may be enlightened. I certainly was.

IME the helix cutters ones don't like feeding green soft stuff, preferring something drier and more woody. Worth a try I suppose if you don't mind a shredder full of apple juice!

Is there a blender in the kitchen ?

You get to keep all the juice and bits in a blender.

Nice and neat, until you pour the mess into your muslin cloth to filter the juice and keep out the pulp bits.

I tasted a batch made by someone else, then tasted the batch I made (where I extracted all the juice). I expect the skin of the fruit was releasing a lot of bitter stuff during the last bit of my extraction.

If taste matters to you, run a small batch, and see if you can notice a difference near the end or not. Like a distillation, the first juice may not taste like the last juice.

Paul

Folowing a link derived during searching: "Pulping (or scratting) apples ....."

So it's pulping, Why not call it that?

Somebody could edit the Wiktionary. That only has the slang meaning.

Yes, that's very true. I'll give it a try before dismantling and cleaning.

Yes, but it might not like being asked to deal with several hundred apples, complete with cores ... incurring the wrath of SWMBO must also be considered.

Yes, an apple scratter pulps apples.

An example of common use:

ISTR recall we have a juice extractor that mounts on the top of a kenwood chef. A combination of shredding blades and a centrifuge... Works quite well, and will process moderate quantities fairly quickly.

(probably take a few hours to do a trees worth of apples though!)

That is kind of the raison d'etre of the urban dictionary - to provide the most base and sometimes entertaining definitions of slang expressions.

Probably not your go-to source for more academic dictionary citations!

I'm a firm believer in using the word that is understood most widely. In my 60-odd years, I've never come across the word "scratting" before.

Is a macerating action of a garden shredder actually what is wanted? It will cut the pips into bits - and you may not want them in apple juice... assuming that his what you want to produce. Don't you want a gentler action such as a press which will separate the juice from the solid pulp and pips without cutting the pips into tiny fragments.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

How well will the blades and bearings of a shredder stand up to being doused in sticky apple juice?

Interesting that dictionaries don't seem to mention that meaning of "scrat(ter)", implying pulping or pressing apples.

I wonder if it's a word that is largely obsolete except in very specific contexts such as an apple scratter where it is assumed that *everyone* knows what it means!

The sabre toothed squirrel in the Ice Age cartoons is called Scrat.

When extracting juice you use a two sage processes - a mincer to turn whole apples into smaller chinks, and a press to bust the cells themselves.

That is because it isn't pulping or pressing. Its more akin to mincing.

.....

Ive never heard it but I instantly knew exactly what he meant by it because I used to own one.

The term used is a mill , crusher or pulper

We only have a single compact family apple tree. Whilst the crop is usually enough to have us trying to find ways to use them all, it is not so large that bulk solutions are appropriate.

I bought one of these back when the new price was close to this used one.:

In round figures, 2 kg of fruit yields a little over a litre of juice. We like it cloudy, so simply remove the larger material in a perforated conical strainer, and pop it in the fridge.

We did initially try more rigorous filtration, but it was very slow, and pointless, given our tastes.

We are able to use our windfalls by quickly removing damaged portions, and any unwanted wildlife.

Cleaning the juicer is a bit of a labour. Given its volume disassembled, being told that it is dishwasher safe is no great help.

Chris