Discovering New Alternatives for Hard Apple Cider in Recipes

Ever since I discovered I have food allergies, I have tried my best to adjust any recipe I use to avoid my allergies. Over the years I’ve become more adapted to recognizing recipes with ingredients I can’t use and how to still use the recipe anyway.

Last year, I decided to try make a new bagel recipe. It called for hard apple cider or beer for it. I don’t like to make recipes with beer in it because beer normally plays an important role in the recipe. In fact, the role is so important that I find it is hard to use the recipe with alternative ingredients.

Even though the recipe called for beer or hard apple cider (Both of which I am allergic to) I still decided to give it a try. I thought that if hard apple cider can be used instead of beer, then I could use another apple-based juice as it’s replacement. That’s when I began to learn about why apple juice isn’t a good substitute for beer or hard apple cider.

If anyone is familiar with cooking with apple juice, hard apple cider, and why they shouldn’t be used interchangeably, then you probably see where my mistake is. For everyone else, apple juice is too sweet to be a substitute for hard apple cider. Although the bagels did turn out really well (I don’t know how I did that but it worked) they were awfully sweet. Too sweet for my tastes. So, I began to work on figuring out a different alternative for hard apple cider.

After doing some research, I discovered normal apple cider would work as well as unsweetened apple juice. Both sound like it will work well with the recipe. I also read that apple cider vinegar would work well too, but I’m not sure how well it will work in this specific recipe.

Even though I have found new hard apple cider alternatives to try in my bagel recipe, I have yet to make any bagels. It took me such a long time to find any information about this that it made me really frustrated. So, I gave up, then returned to searching for new alternatives. I think I finally found what I was looking for, so I’m going to move forward in trying them out in the foreseeable future.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!

Featured Image by Anshu A from Unsplash.com. Image Edited by Me.