Ingredients For Spiced Apple Cider

Series Summary

Apple cider is a popular drink in the United States and Canada produced from pressed apples. Commonly served during the late autumn months to correspond with the harvest season, apple cider is a traditional beverage for Halloween or Thanksgiving holidays. Apple cider is different from regular apple juice in that it is more sour and cloudy from retaining the tart apple pulp. In cold weather, apple cider is frequently served hot, and often garnished with a variety of spices, from cinnamon to cloves to nutmeg and pumpkin seasonings.

In this free video series, our expert will demonstrate how to make a traditional hot apple cider recipe. Expert Brandon Sarkis demonstrates this classic holiday hot drink recipe in easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions. You'll learn what ingredients and supplies you need to make the cider, how to combine the ingredients, including a lemon zest, and how to strain ans serve the perfect mug of hot apple cider. This is a great hot drink for any cold fall day or to add to a wonderful holiday party.

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to make the holiday favorite, Spiced Apple Cider. OK there is not really a great deal in the way of ingredients to this. But that's what makes it fun. It's easy to make. Over here I've got one quart of apple juice. This is actually fresh squeezed apple juice. You can buy the stuff from the store. Just make sure if you get the stuff from the store it is the no sugar added variety. Because when they add the sugar to it, it's going to throw this recipe off because we're already going to add sugar to our recipe, so try to get the cleanest apple juice you can get if you're going to buy it. Like I said my recommendation is fresh squeezed. We're also going to add one cinnamon stick. You can buy these in your grocery store in your spice aisle. Pretty common stuff. Don't ever try to eat one of these. Resist the temptation to think that this would taste good on its own, because i assure it would not. Cinnamon by itself is a horrible, horrible tasting thing. Mix it with sugar though and you have a different story. Now these are black peppercorns. Like the kind for black pepper. Like the stuff you put on vegetables, like salt and pepper. We're going to need twenty of these. You can buy these at the grocery store as well. They're just plain black ones. Don't get any other color besides black. Sometimes they will sell like a mixed variety at the store. Like pink and white or like green in there. Those have very different flavor profiles, just black only for this. Also you'll need four cloves. That's these little tiny things like this. You can get these from the grocery store as well, in the spice aisle. These are really, really strong and if you try to eat these also, they smell delicious but you try to eat them, once again , they taste really horrible. So you only want to get these and use them in stuff, not to try to eat them separately. Here i have two tablespoons of just plain light brown sugar. I use light brown because it doesn't effect the coloring so much. If you use a dark brown, it will actually turn your cider a different color. So be aware of that, so just two tablespoons of that. And I've also got a lemon here. And now this lemon is we're not going to use the lemon juice, we're just going to use the lemon zest, the lemon rind, so if you already have a lemon laying around or half a lemon laying around, we're not going to use the whole thing. We're just going to use basically about a teaspoon to a teaspoon and a half of lemon zest. So if you already have a lemon laying around that you've only used half of or something, then that would be fine. I'm just going to go ahead and use a whole one. So with that, let's move on to the equipment that we are going to need."