Apple Butter

I’ve been making fried apples, apple pies, and apple crisp, not to mention slicing an endless number of apples up for snacks and lunches. Over the weekend I decided to make apple butter. I was originally going to just make “a batch” and enjoy it, refrigerated.

But somehow I started cleaning out the garage over the weekend and that led me to look up into the storage area a previous owner had built, only to see the myriad empty boxes. You could tell a lot about my professional freelance career, perhaps, by analyzing those boxes. From a very old Packard Bell box to the latest Dell; from a cheap no-name scanner to the last HP LaserJet I bought several years ago. A friend offered to come over with his truck and go to the dump with me to drop the boxes for recycling. Well, not only did he show up to help with that, he climbed up and pulled down boxes that existed in this house before I even moved in 16 (!) years ago, which was more than I had hoped for! Flattened old wardrobe boxes and boxes stuffed with paper, plus my own computer boxes. We pulled the Styrofoam out of everything, flattened them, and loaded up his truck. No dump fee for recyclable stuff! What a treat! Now, I have the Styrofoam to get rid of but since a typical week has me only filling my garbage container halfway, I’ll be through with that in no time.

Removing all those old boxes revealed my secret, semi-forgotten stash of canning supplies. Boxes of quart Mason jars. My mom’s old huge canning pot for hot water baths. And inside the pot was a funnel, tongs, the rack to hold the jars, a few boxes of lids, and her old food mill.

I grew up with the secure feeling of rows of glass jars of food stowed away. One house we lived in had what we called “the storage room,” a long “hall” with no exit, lined on each side with sliding panels that revealed shelves. This was when we lived “in the country” and during that time, to the best of my recollection, we always had a huge garden and my mother would can applesauce, jams and jellies of various types, peaches, pears, stewed tomatoes, dill pickles, and probably more things than I can remember. Dessert was often “go pick a jar of fruit.” But I hated the stewed tomatoes that seemed a winter mainstay for our vegetable dish. A small bowl of stewed tomatoes appeared at the table nearly every night in the winter. Ugh. I love tomatoes today, but I’m not sure I would eat stewed tomatoes even now. The pickles, though, were better than anything you could ever buy. The canned fruit was either off our own trees or locally grown and bought by the lug. There’s another story in there about how we, as kids, used to pick apples for the guy that made cider locally.

When I moved into this house I live in now, with its 14 fruit trees (or perhaps more when we moved in), I decided to make applesauce one year. With four apple trees, you’d think it’s a natural. However, whomever planted the trees here did a remarkable job of staggering the fruit production. Lemons are available about 8 months of the year. Cherries come in around Memorial Day. My first apple tree, a tart green cooking apple, comes ripe in June. Plums come in the summer. The apricot tree has since died, but the blood peaches I planted come in September. There used to be a fig tree as well. Now in September I have two large apple trees full of fruit and it’s a bit overwhelming. Later in December when the last winter apple comes ripe, I’ll be able to really enjoy it as the nearly final fruit of the year, although it, the persimmon tree, and the orange tree are typically good through January or February. March through May are fairly barren except for lemons. The fruit trees are part of how we measure the passing of time here.

Anyway, the first few years, before I found someone who knew how to prune the trees for me, the apples were way overproducing and much of the fruit was too high to pick, so it would come falling down to the ground from on high and get split open. I bought a fruit picker with an extendable pole, which helped. But the apples were coming ripe faster than I could pick bags of them to give away. I asked my Mom to come down and help me can some applesauce. She said sure and brought me her equipment, which she said she was done with. We cooked apples all day long and canned I don’t know how many quarts of applesauce. We were both exhausted. As I recall, I had a baby or toddler at the time, so was dealing with that at the same time. And at the end of the day, my Mom looked over our rows of glass jars of applesauce and said “That’s it. I’ve taught you. I’m done. I don’t ever want to do this again.”

Over the years I’ve followed the general guidelines from Stocking Up : The Third Edition of America’s Classic Preserving Guide and some recipes from Fine Preserving. I made some spiced cherry jam one year, which was fantastic, and some lemon and orange marmalade another year. And I’ve done various frozen batches of tomato sauce, applesauce, and more. But in general, the whole canning thing has scared me somehow. But I saw the stuff up there and saw the many apples left on the tree, despite all my crisps and pies and decided to do “something small” like apple butter. I picked the apples this morning after the youngest left for school., cooked them down with some cider while I worked this morning, took a break to run them through my KitchenAid food strainer attachment, then through the batch into my slow cooker for the final stages of cooking, coming down every half hour or so to stir things up. At some point I added some honey, cinnamon, allspice, and ground cloves. I didn’t measure the spices though. I did start with:

5 pounds of apples, sliced (not cored or peeled or anything)
3 cups apple cider

I cooked this in my big stockpot until the apples were mush. I love my KitchenAid strainer attachment (and use it when I cook up pumpkins also) but a hand food mill would work as well. I took all the good stuff and put it in the slow cooker on high, stirring until it thickened. I added the spice and sweetener about when I put my big old canning pot half full of water on the stove to come to a boil.

I probably ended up adding about:

2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 cup honey
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp allspice

These are fairly sweet apples though. Tart ones would probably require more honey or sugar. I’m not sure what kind mine are since I didn’t plant them. Perhaps Red Delicious that don’t get too red since we don’t have the cold nights here. I took all of the ones this morning from the red-skinned tree. The other tree that’s ripe right now is a Golden Delicious I think. I just picked this tree because it was closer to the kitchen.

I put my jars in the dishwasher to clean them, then put them in a sink of hot water until I was ready. After the apple butter thickened and the big pot of water came to a boil, I took another break from work and filled the jars, leaving 1/2″ of headroom. Put the jars into the boiling water and processed for 10 minutes. As they cooled, on several layers of towel, I heard the familiar PING! as the lids sealed. There was half a jar left over and I stuck that in the frig.

The girls each had a taste as they got home from school and wanted to sit and
eat it like applesauce. I had to promise to make a batch of applesauce later. So I brought down the quart jars and cleaned up a dozen of them.

The applesauce recipes I see all say to core and peel but I don’t see why I can’t do what I did here, and cook it all up with core and peel and just run it through the strainer. I’m a pretty good apple peeler and can regular impress the girls by peeling an apple in one fell swoop, with a long apple peel in one piece. But pushing it all through the strainer seems much simpler.