Recipe - Applesauce

Applesauce

Recently, Mom and I made applesauce. Homemade applesauce beats the store stuff hands down, as far as I’m concerned.    Making applesauce is incredibly easy, but I will outline the steps here for anyone who has not tried it before.

The Apples:

Start with the right apples.  You want an apple that will “cook down”; that is, will effectively disintegrate over heat.  If you buy your apples from a farm stand, ask the proprietor for suggestions.  We used MacIntosh, out of nostalgia – we made our applesauce from Macs for decades when we lived in New York, so to us it has the “right” flavor.  If you don’t mind a little extra work, you can certainly use seconds or drops for applesauce – you’ll just need to spend a little extra time trimming off any blemishes.

Prepping the Apples:

Pare and core the apples, cut into chunks and fill up a large soup pot.  Cutting the apples smaller means less cooking time for them to cook down, resulting in a “fresher” flavor.  Our pot held about 10 lbs of apples (weighed while they were still whole).

Cooking:

Add a little water to prevent scorching.  For our batch, I added about one cup.  Turn the heat to medium low and put the cover on.  Stir every 5 minutes or so, to move the top apple pieces down to the bottom.  Continue to cook until the applesauce reaches the consistency you like.  This year, we decided to make ours a little chunky, so we stopped cooking while there were still some visible pieces in the sauce.  I then used a potato masher to get the chunks to a more uniform size.

The Question of Additives:

Here is where personal taste comes in to play.  Some people like their applesauce a little sweet, so you can add sugar (white or brown) at any time in the cooking process.  Just be sure to put it in early enough so it has time to dissolve completely.  And some people like some spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves are good choices.  If you are using whole spices, tie them in a cheesecloth bag and put in the pot at the start of cooking; if you are using ground spices, stir them in at the end.  I am an applesauce purist, so I don’t add anything.

Then what?

If you’ve made a small batch, just put in containers and keep in the fridge.  If you’ve made a lot, you probably want to can it.  See my post on canning for how this works.  Process applesauce for 10 minutes in a hot water bath.  

Our 10 pounds of apples resulted in about 7 pints of applesauce.