Applesauce & Apple Butter

This is going to be a lazy post (I apologize now). I dumpster a lot of apples in the late fall, and this year I also went apple picking at a local farm, so I've had a lot of use for apple preserving tactics. My favorites? Applesauce and apple butter. Applesauce is perfect for Thanksgiving or to pair with Hanukkah potato latkes. Or, y'know, applesauce is a pretty great snack by itself too.

The excellent part is this: when you get tired of your canned applesauce, you can make apple butter out of it! I love giving jars of apple butter to family during the holidays. It's thoughtful, homemade, and lasts about 1 year if you use proper canning technique. After you open the jar, it'll keep in the fridge for at least another 2-8 months, depending on how much sugar you put in it (since sugar is a preservative).

Here's my favorite recipe for making applesauce at home. You can tweak their recipe by adding lemon juice (also works as a preservative), keeping the rinds in there as you cook the apples down and removing them before you mash everything up:

http://www.pickyourown.org/applesaucewomill.htm



Now, apple butter is way easier than you'd think. It's literally just cooking applesauce down at a very low temperature for a very long time until there's very little moisture left in it. You can add extra spices and more sugar during this process too, depending on how tart or sweet your applesauce was to begin with. There's two methods to achieve apple butter: 1) cook it on the stove at a low heat or 2) use a crock pot at very low heat.

The crock pot is a little safer, since you have to leave it on while you're presumably at work or otherwise living your life. Here's good instructions on how to make apple butter. You can futz with the proportions to make more or less, depending on how much applesauce you start out with:

http://www.pickyourown.org/applebutter.htm


Something I like to do when I'm giving tiny jars of apple butter to people is spice them up a little. For pretty much all home canning, you're using jars with 2 pieces to the lid - a ring and a flat part. If you have some fabric scraps (a cool old t-shirt works fine), you can put the piece of fabric in between the flat part of the lid and the ring, like this:


Now you don't need wrapping paper!

Other apple ideas are apple juice (which comes out of making a lot of applesauce) or apple cider.

Ingredients not donated or dumpstered: spices