A big thank you to Lisa for sending me the link to this recipe! HERE is the link to the original blog with the recipe. I pretty much followed her recipe, but I added my pictures! But please go check out Burgh Baby's blog as she has some great recipes and some great ideas over there.
So, let me tell you about applesauce. We grew up on home made applesauce. My Mom and my Aunt Mary canned apple sauce every year and they canned a BUNCH of it. And we went through every single jar. They made the best apple sauce I've ever had. When they stopped canning (or maybe when I moved away) I stopped eating applesauce all together since store bought was horrible next to home made. After years of going without, I finally caved and started to buy some at the store. It was in no way as good as Mom's, but it did finally get to be better than nothing.
I know how much work Mom and Aunt Mary put into canning the applesauce. We kids always had to help with the grunt work and trust me, there was plenty of that. But it was worth every drop of sweat that went into making this nectar of the gods. For real.
I know I'm not a good cook and there is no way I'm smart enough to figure out canning. That's why I thought this recipe was genius and seemed easy enough for even ME to do!
The original recipe calls for you to use four or five different kinds of apples. But, I wasn't willing to put that much financially into a project that I wasn't sure was going to work. I thought this first batch I'd start out small and see how it went. I have been buying Gala apples for awhile now. I take one to work almost every day to have at lunch. They are sweet with a little tartness to them. Since I had some Gala apples, I just bought another bag of the same kind and was ready to go. Here is what you need:
As with any new project, you should start with a steaming hot cup of fresh coffee. That's for you, Georgia! Coffee in hand, you now need:
The combination of the size of my crock pot and the size of the Gala apples, I used about a bag and a half of apples. Peel, core and cut enough apples to fill your crock pot. The apples will cook down to about half of the volume of the apples with which you started.
It looks good already, doesn't it?!! I could have added a couple of more apples but trust me, I was DONE peeling, coring and cutting. Whatever. Now I added:
1/2 cup of water and the juice of 1/2 of a lemon. I juiced the lemon right into the measured water because I always lose a seed or two. That way I could easily pick it back out. After I juiced the 1/2 lemon into the water, I poured it over the apples in the crock pot.
If you'd like to throw a few cinnamon sticks in now, help yourself. For me, I prefer mine without the cinnamon.
Cover and cook on low for 4 to 6 hours. Really, can it GET any easier? Cook until the apples turn themselves into applesauce when you stir. Easy peasy.
I left mine a little chunky because that's how I like it!
The three of us tasted the applesauce at this point and voted on whether we needed to add any honey to sweeten it. I did end up adding one tablespoon of honey and it was then as perfect as we were going to get it!
I'm telling you, I can't believe how good this was AND how freakin' easy this was! Did it come out as good as Mom's? No, but it was a hell of a lot better than anything you can buy in the grocery store.
I didn't can what we yielded but I did put it in a few Rubbermaid containers. The original recipe states that you can freeze the applesauce and use when needed. Yeah, that will be a good plan on the next batch that I make. To be honest, there wasn't enough left of THIS batch to freeze any! It was really good!
So there you go. Crock pot applesauce. It took me probably 1/2 of an hour to peel and cut all of the apples. After that, I goofed off all day while it cooked away. I went and gave it a little stir about once an hour and it was done in about five hours. I will definitely be doing another batch this weekend!
4 comments:
I'm glad the recipe worked out for you! I might have to give it a try, too! I wonder what your mom's secret ingredient was. Maybe it was a certain kind of apple?
LOL@ my word verification
emsjud 365
Thanks a lot for this tasty cup of coffe and the awesome recipe. Reminds me of my granny, who used to cook apple compote in fall. Big hugs, my dear friend!
Secret ingredient: maybe it was a bit ground lemon peel!? My Granny used to make it like this.
Oh, please send a bowl of your apple sauce through the wire!!!!!
Secret ingredient?? Spit?? Love?? No idea. As kids, our job was to use this wooden mallet kind of thing and push the cooked apple out through the holes of this sieve like contraption. That way all of the meat went into the applesauce while the seeds and such stayed behind. It was hard work for a kid but worth the rewards.
Other than that, I remember Mom and Aunt Mary boiling all of the jars before canning and then lining them all up on the wooden board they put over our kitchen table to cool. Hey, I'm old. My memory isn't what it used to be! Besides . . . hey look! A bright shiny object!
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