2008 Applesauce Adventure

Last weekend Dave brought 3 apple boxes full of "wind-fall" Gravenstein apples from his parents' orchard. I'd only asked for two since I didn't want to spend 3 sweltering nights slaving over a hot stove. But here I am on night 3, blogging next to the stove so I don't forget to stir the pot. Once the dishwasher cycle is done (to sterilize the jars) I'll begin straining sauce with the KitchenAid. Then it'll be another hour or so to pack the jars, process them, and clean up.

Luckily Edward is here in Davis visiting me so he "gets" to help me! You can see how tiring cutting up apples was for him:
The first night we didn't start coring apples until about 8:30pm so I didn't get to bed until after 1am. That first batch is sorta boring since I was too tired and hot to let the apples cook down much or stew with the sachet of cinnamon and cloves. I'm sure it still tastes better than store-bought, though.

Last night we divided the sauce into two pots and added a gallon of fruit pulp to each. We made a batch of apricot apple sauce and a batch of plum apple sauce. The plum was a bit tart so we added a cup of Bower family honey. I like knowing that the only ingredients were made right at my in-laws house. How much more homemade can you get, really? (I'm sure my dad will email me, suggesting that we could blow our own glass jars or something...)

Tonight's batch has been cooking a good bit longer than the first and I doubled-up the spices in the sachet. I'm hoping I can justify writing "spicy apple sauce, 8/2008" on the lids of the jars.

Step 1, fill a HUGE pot with cut, cored apples. Keep the skins on for good flavor and a nice pink color that store bought apple sauce lacks:
Next, add a little water and crank up the heat (not too high!) so they cook down. Toss in a sachet of spices (cinnamon sticks and whole cloves) to add flavor. Make sure you stir it often so it doesn't scorch. This can take upwards of 1.5 hours if you're patient so make sure you have a radio to listen to, or at the very least, a brother in the livingroom watching the Olympics to tell you a play-by-play so you don't get bored:
Then you rig-up your trusty KitchenAid mixer with the fruit strainer attachment to remove the skins for a silky smooth sauce:
Then just fill your sterilized jars, seal, and process in a rolling boil water bath for 10 minutes:

Ta-da! Now you have more jars of apple sauce then you know what to do with. This picture doesn't show all of them, but I think I ended up with 30 quarts total:
I'm sure I'll look back at this post and wonder what I was thinking...but I'd love to make my own baby food when I have kids. I could grow oodles of carrots, sweet potatoes, and green beans, cook them down like this and can them in the teeny little jars I keep my spices in. How cool would that be?