11 Best Uses for Crab Apples (Yep, You Can Eat Them!)

Last Updated on June 20, 2024

Ever noticed all those crab apples hanging from trees in fall and wondered, if they’re edible? You’ll be pleased to learn that despite their unfortunate name, you can indeed eat crab apples. Find out what you can do with crab apples if you find yourself with an abundance this fall. Here are 11 uses for crab apples to try this season.

GETTING TO KNOW USES FOR CRAB APPLES

As a longtime grower of fruit in a frustratingly small yard, I’ve often marveled at how often homeowners choose something other than fruit trees and shrubs when landscaping. Truth be told, it boggles my mind. How can you possibly not want bowls brimming with juneberries, honeyberries, and other wonderful fruits that can easily be incorporated into an ornamental landscape? Never made any sense to me.

However, unbeknownst to those who think they prefer “ornamental” trees when they plant crab apples, they’re actually planting food! (Actually a bunch of other trees are edible as well. Check out gingko, spruce, pine and other medicinal trees people grow in their ornamental yards.)

Now with so many other wild fruits to forage in summer — juneberries, mulberries, wild black raspberries, elderberries — not many of us bother with crabapples.

But come autumn, when the options for foraging fall off a cliff, determined foragers make the most of what they can find, whether it’s black chokeberries or rowan berries, and yes, crab apples.

While they can take a little more work to appreciate, this challenge is appealing to many people, especially those of us missing summer’s abundance.

And seriously, when you see a tree brimming with fruit like the one below, how can you not ask yourself, ‘What can I do with crab apples?’

YES CRAB APPLES ARE EDIBLE (AND SOME ARE QUITE TASTY!)

As you’ve certainly figured out by now, crabapples are indeed edible and safe to eat, though most aren’t generally something you want to munch right off the tree. They’re pretty tart and need some cooking and sweetening to be enjoyed.

Read on to find out what you need to know about using crab apples in recipes.

WHAT IS A CRAB APPLE, ANYWAY?

Crab apples are essentially wild apples, members of the Malus genus. The fruit we call apples have been bred over centuries to be larger and sweeter. If the fruit of a Malus tree is bigger than 2 inches in diameter, we tend to call those apples. Smaller than two inches, and we call them crab apples.

Like apples, crab apples contain seeds and cores that we mostly avoid when we use them. The seeds contain a cyanogenic glycoside called amygdalin, which gets converted to cyanide when metabolized. You’ll also find cyanogenic glycosides in elderberries, which is why so many people ask, are elderberries poisonous? (They’re not!)

You’d have to eat a lot of ground up crab apple seeds to have a problem with these compounds, which are also found in loads of foods we eat every day, like almonds. Whole seeds we swallow reportedly don’t even release their amygdalin. Studies of amygdalin in apple seeds find that the amount of amygdalin in a single apple is well below the threshold of acute cyanide poisoning, so if you want to try a recipe for chutney or pickled crab apples, a few whole crabapples shouldn’t be an issue and hasn’t been for the people who make these dishes.

Crab apples contain fiber, polyphenols, and a small amount of vitamin C.

FORAGING EDIBLE CRAB APPLES

CRABAPPLE TREE IDENTIFICATION

–> The first rule of foraging is to make absolutely certain you’re correctly identifying the plant you want to forage. Consult a good foraging guide or a local foraging expert when foraging for the first time. These are my top recommendations for the best foraging books.

You might also take a class like the Herbal Academy’s online foraging course to help you master plant identification and wildcrafting practices.

Fortunately, crab apples are pretty easy to identify.

HABITAT AND GROWTH HABIT

Crab apples grow widely across the northern hemisphere, and are a popular landscape tree. You’ll find them in parks, in street plantings, and in people’s yards, as well as growing wild.

They typically grow 15 to 30 feet tall and may have a variety of growth habits. They can be rounded, horizontal, pyramidal, weeping, or columnar.

LEAVES

Leaves are oval in shape with serrated edges, coming to a point at the tip. They grow in an alternate pattern on the tree branch.

FRUIT

Crab apples can vary in size, from tiny blueberry-size fruits up to 2 inches in diameter, at which point we start calling them apples. They can be bright red, green, yellow, or a mix of these colors.

Crab apples grow in clusters, usually scattered all over the tree, making them easy to distinguish from rowan, which has more isolated, drooping clusters of fruit that usually contain more individual pomes.

CRAB APPLE LOOKALIKES

The primary plant some people mistake for crab apples is hawthorn, which is also edible. Hawthorn has similar-looking fruit but generally different-shaped leaves and very prominent thorns. However, thornless hawthorns (most commonly cockspur hawthorn) have leaves very similar to crabapples and no tell-tale thorns. If you’re in a public landscape, odds are any hawthorn you find is thornless.

One easy way to check if you’ve got hawthorn or crabapple is to cut into them. A crabapple will cut easily and have a core with seeds similar to an apple, while hawthorns have a VERY hard central seed high in amygdalin that must be discarded. If you do find a hawthorn, you’ve found another useful fall edible, which you can learn more about in an upcoming post.

WHAT DO CRAB APPLES TASTE LIKE?

Crab apples are known for their tart flavor, thanks to the concentration of malic acid (where the genus name ‘Malus‘ comes from). If you enjoy tart apples like Haralson or Liberty, a good crab apple will taste very similar. Very ripe ones may lose some of their tartness.

While the fruits we now call apples have been bred for flavor and texture, the crab apples you’ll see planted everywhere have largely been bred for their ornamental value. Some crab apples will taste far better than others.

Some crab apples will also have a bitter, tannic flavor, and it may be best to pass on those. Details on how to tell below.

WHICH CRAB APPLES ARE BEST FOR FORAGING?

The larger the crab apple, the more likely it is to be something you’d want to eat. In fact, many nurseries stock a variety called ‘Chestnut crab,’ which is used as a small eating apple. It’s a nice tart apple, and the trees produce well. It’s one of the first trees I planted in my permaculture garden. My local natural foods store sells them every autumn with all the other yummy fall apples.

Larger crab apples will also be far easier to work with, since like the apples you’re used to, they’re best cored before eating. There are some recipes out there that use whole crab apples, but most of us prefer to skip eating the core and seeds.

When deciding which crab apples to forage, your best bet after you’ve positively identified the tree as a crab apple tree is to take a taste. While you shouldn’t expect crab apples to taste wonderful raw, if the flavor is so revolting you need to spit it out immediately, it’s unlikely you’ll enjoy anything made with it.

These cherry-size crab apples tasted a lot like little tart apples when I bit into them before our first frost, but their size will make them pretty tedious to core. They’ll be best for uses where you can use the crab apples whole.

Redder crab apples reportedly tend to be more bitter than their greener cousins, but these beauties were actually quite tasty right off the tree! If you don’t like tart fruit, though, most crab apples will be too sour for you and will be best enjoyed in recipes involving sweetener.

WHEN ARE CRAB APPLES RIPE?

Crab apples start to ripen in late summer and early fall. But as with rowan berries, crab apples’ flavor may mellow in colder temperatures, so wait to harvest them if you can. Some foragers report finding that even the tiny red crabapples become quite tasty after enduring weeks or months of winter.

To determine whether crab apples are ripe, cut one open and check the seeds. They should be dark brown, though some varieties may have lighter seeds than others.

The flesh of the crab apple should be firm, though not so hard it’s difficult to bite into. Underripe crab apples are more likely to have an unpleasant bitter flavor.

Many crab apples will hang on through the fall and into the winter, great for foragers looking for something besides conifers to forage during the frozen months. Though pine needle tea, spruce tea, and pine syrup are lovely, having some fruit to forage also is nice!

WHAT TO DO WITH CRAB APPLES? {BEST USES FOR CRAB APPLES}

Remember, like their apple cousins, crab apples have cores and seeds. Because they’re so small, coring crab apples is a notorious pain. Recipes for jelly or sauce usually call for whole crab apples, which are then strained or separated out with a food mill.

If you’re not sure what to do with crab apples, here are a bunch of uses for crab apples you can try if you have a big haul this season:

• Make crabapple sauce, which can be made into homemade fruit leather. Try subbing crab apples for apples in this delicious sugar-free apple pear fruit leather recipe.
• One of the most well-known uses for crab apples, crab apple jelly has a rich apple-y flavor.
• Use crab apples in place of apples for homemade vinegar. Here’s how to make vinegar from scratch.
• High in pectin, a great use for crab apples is homemade pectin. Instructions here.
• Bake chunks of tart crab apples into muffins or quickbreads anywhere you’d use apples.
• Make crab apple syrup to use in cocktails (recipe here).
• You can pickle crab apples and use them as a condiment.
• Try making homemade crab apple chutney.
• People make all sorts of things into wine. Here’s a recipe if you want to try your hand at crab apple wine!
• Make an unusual liqueur by steeping crab apples in alcohol. Instructions here.

Have you ever used crabapples before? What are your favorite uses for crab apples?

Save this info on uses for crab apples for later!

Photo credits in cover and pin: KCmelete, Yulia_Davidovich, mayina

Susannah

Susannah is a proud garden geek and energy nerd who loves healthy food and natural remedies. Her work has appeared in Mother Earth Living, Ensia, Northern Gardener, Sierra, and on numerous websites. Her first book, Everything Elderberry, released in September 2020 and has been a #1 new release in holistic medicine, naturopathy, herb gardening, and other categories. Find out more and grab your copy here.