I switched to no sugar added store-bought applesauce when feeding babies many years ago. I quickly became encouraged to make homemade applesauce to improve the texture and quality of food I was feeding my family. After buying our farm with a mature orchard we started making yearly batches together with the kids to stock the pantry.
Applebutter video linked here: https://youtu.be/XGp1F-g1FmQ
Hi everyone welcome back to the YouTube channel today we are starting in on some batches of homemade applesauce I’ve got these beautiful apples from my tree they cook down beautifully for applesauce without hardly any blending chopping I just quarter my apples to cut out the cores just to help
Get a little less seeds and we found that the hard hauls around the seeds don’t always come out so well in the food mill so I’ve got my pot all full I usually take about a half a mason jar of water and add it to the bottom of my
Pot just to make sure that I don’t have any scorching before the juices start to release so it’s able to get an extraordinarily early start on my day today so I’ve already done two other pots of apples I just added that one onto the stove under medium heat with a
Little bit of water and these have been cooking on medium for probably about 20 minutes while I’ve been filling some other pots and to add to my batch I went ahead and filled up my crock poot and I put this one on high and the color of those
Skins have changed a lot they actually look like red skinn potatoes right now so we’re going to soften them up a little bit more and then I’m going to start chopping things with my chopping blade it really helps smooth it out it’s a little bit noisy but it’s
Well worth it um I believe it’s a lot uh more pleasant to do it this way than putting an immersion blender in um just because the flesh from the Apple uh really helps separate very easily I’ve got my lids and bands and my jars all
Ready to go I’m set up with my canning station after after I have a little more space on my stove top I will fill this with water and a tablespoon or two of vinegar um to help with any uh hard water collecting on the outsides of the
Jars so that’s something else I’m going to work on while those apples are cooking and I’ll tell you with a morning like this going on I’d rather be in here in the warm than out there having to pick the apples and start in on my chores just after
Sunrise a thing to keep in mind is every time Ty of Apple Cooks in a different amount of time also depending on how large you decide to chop your chunks so I pretty much quartered mine and you can see some of this is already breaking down um into apples sauce I don’t want
Um my liquid or my juices from my apples to turn into a big pulpy mess because then you’d have really watery applesauce and that would separate during the cany process so I’ve got this really big scoop cander and if you had a big like sink cander you could pour this pot right
Into that I just scoop it out a little at a time give it plenty of time to let that drip and drain and like I said you could stick an immersion blender right down in there but then you’re going to have watery applesauce so I’m just going to pulse this real
Quick and just go to where you want your texture of applesauce to be thick or chunky now I’m going to be running it through the food mill I’ve got that set up here as well um I prefer to have my food meal right on the top of this pot because it’s a heavy
Bottom uh I’m going to have to transfer things around from Bold to bowl until my pot is empty because I wanted to do as large a canning day today as possible so that looks pretty good and then the food mill will help remove any skins from this now you see
It’s slightly pinkish colored um if you don’t want any coloring to your applesauce and you just want it to look that kind of yellowish whitish peel your apples I like that the kids are getting a little something from them and honestly a lot of the Skins um fall off
Anyway but you can see that color just came right off of that Apple during the cooking process so for the most part like a skin like that would get chopped up in here but then it’s such small bits that some of it does go through the food
Mill and it’s good for the kids bellies and good for mine so while I have my food mill process set up and I’m working on that I am sanitizing my jars in my water bath caner so I’ve got this filled with water and vinegar I’m going to lower these
Down with the lid on and basically I’m preheating my water for my water bath caner because you want your jars your water and your contents of your jars all to be about equal temperature so after the food mill I’m actually going to put that pot back on the stove top to get it
Heated up but this amount of water takes so long to heat up on an electric stove that it is sanitizing my jars and preheating at the same time it’s a great process also a quick tip for you this liquid is full of natural pectin so if
You don’t want to buy pectin at the store you can add that liquid to your fruit in your next batch of jam or jelly and that will help set up your fruit the pectin is all naturally found in the cores and the skin of the apples
So this is a good home setting tip to get you further in that home setting journey and get you kind of out of the grocery store um on some of your other endeavors so last week I made strawberry rhubarb jam if I had made my applesauce first I wouldn’t have needed the store
Bought Jam so I can use this pectin I can freeze it I can can it I can just put it up for the next batch of anything that I’m going to make and I know that I’ve got some elderberries in the freezer that are going to need some pectin
So after you’ve used your food mill I advise you it doesn’t just get clogged um if you go in reverse see right there that scrapes that Bottom clean I’ll back it up and show you see there and puts it right on top of the paddle so you can
Save that and feed it to your chickens livestock whatever you prefer or you can put it aside and make an applesauce cake those skins it just all Cooks down so much when you do any baking with it um muffins biscuits you can do like an apple cinnamon bread yum it’s making me hungry
Do okay so when your contents of your pot reached the bottom of your food mill it’s going to stop going through so it’s time to put this pot on the stove bring it up to a hot boil type temperature um I don’t want it splattering all over so
Keep an eye on it or you can put this in the crock pot season it for apple butter this is the first step in making apple butter and you can catch that video I made a couple of days ago so you can catch that video by going to the home
Setting playlist and find it there and as you can see that skin made it a nice pink applesauce if you want to season it with uh cinnamon all spiced nutmeg cloves this is the time to do it while you’re heating it up on the stove
Top also if you want to add sugar this is the time to do it also we do ours unsweetened we find it a nice sweet flavor with the apples that we choose we don’t know the variety of our apples I had mentioned that in a previous video
We just know which trees are sweet which ones work great for applesauce or cider and how to mix them up to get the flavoring that we like okay so my applesauce pots are full I rotated some things around and I put all my applesauce into my red
Pot I’m pulling out my jars from sanitizing in the hot water bath canner preheating and I’m reserving this water on the inside that I put in there to help weigh them down into the sink for cleaning up I always have the tea kettle hot in case I need to add any more water
To the tops and of course you’ve always got your water pot from your lids and fanss they have also been scaled with hot water and they’ve been sitting that softens the rubber seel that’s on the top to get it ready for canning I know some people like to pull
Out one jar at a time and I find it works better for me to just work quickly so quite often I have everything set up assembly line so that I can just keep going from one process to the next so I’ve got my funnel my lid lifter my lids and bands
And I’m just going to start filling these up a half inch head space jar and I had my applesauce on low so that it would not boil and I just dip a big big measuring cup right into the pot the crock pot’s full with another batch of
Applesauce so that that is staying hot and I just put that on warm that way I can continue on with more apples now I processed two 5 gallon buckets of apples today it takes 21 lbs of apples to get seven quart jars so keep that in mind um we’re
A family of seven so I always can in quart jars you can pressure can in half gallon jars but they are too large for the water bath caner um to be an inch or two underwater they take up all the space um so the court jars work really well for
Us one boy he’s 17 can sit down and devour an entire quart of applesauce in one setting by himself and this applesauce is nice and thin I have caught my children with straws Sing Down my off fast which I don’t like cuz it never washes out of the
Straws so before we put the lids and bands on these we will make sure that the tops are clean if you have any applesauce or stickiness on the tops you’re going to have jars that won’t seal if you fill more than a/ inch head space that can
Give you trouble with seiling and if you try to reuse any lids and bands um it can give you trouble with sealing now in a pinch um there’s other brands um Tattler Lids uh and the old style ones with a zinc lid and a removable rubber I
Don’t recommend using those I don’t know enough about them I just have some for collection um that I got from my stepdad who had saved them from his mother from the 1930s I have more in my pot and I can’t scoop it out I need another surface so I have a very interesting
Collection um and a very old collection of mason jars one mason jar I have right here says pick up Mom’s mason jar I like to drink from those but I’m in a pinch I’m having to can with it I like to save those and I really would
Hate for something to happen to it um I’ve seen them for sale for as much as $30 for a quart and about 25 for a pint and this collection that I got from my mom and secondhand from a farmwife was really interesting to have on hand and see all the different kinds
I have some that say presto genuine genuine ball I’ve got Cur so we’re going to debubble all of these then put on the lids and bands and they’re going to go in the water bath canner for 10 minutes now I’m at below 1,00 ft altitude if you are higher than
That uh double check uh like the USD a canning guidelines no lemon no vinegar nothing added to this like I said if you were going to season it with sugar or um cinnamon anything like that do that before you can okay so time to put the lid
On I’ve got that set to high temperature after this comes up to a rolling boil then we’ll set the timer for the 10 minutes when the 10 minutes is done you just turn it off let it set for 5 5 minutes undisturbed before removing them from the water bath caner okay so my
Timer 10 minutes plus five for sitting has gone off and it’s time to start taking the jars out you want to put these on your countertop where they can be undisturbed for 24 hours on a towel you don’t want to put this hot jar on a cold
Counter and if you have high-end counter to s protect them um I really recommend These Old Farm tables so that you got another work surface I have a big L-shaped open kitchen so I just move them on over and they can sit there so I was just talking
With the kids and I’ve got about four buckets of pie apples waiting and I’ve got a crate of apples and maybe three more applesauce buckets we picked a whole bunch the other day because it was going to frost and that was just for a few hours any extra applesauce and jars um pie
Apples I can get it’s great we’ve also been freezing we’ve also been freezing uh cider so that we can enjoy cider with like our Thanksgiving dinner our Christmas dinner so that’s nice to have we just reuse um empty old water jugs or milk jugs that are plastic fill them all
The way full and put them in the freezer then we bring them out to thaw um when we’re ready so it’s going to be 20° in a couple of days in at night for many nights and in the low 40s for a couple of days so I want to process as many
Apples as I can today because I want those buckets so that we can go out and get a refill so that we have enough seven Jars Of Applesauce seems like a lot but when you have a family of seven I can open two to two and a half jars
Quart size jars to feed our family for one sitting for lunch um and like I said the older boys they can sit down with an entire jar all at once okay so here are my beautiful applesauce jars sitting and cooling I’m going to keep them covered with a towel to make
Sure that they don’t get any drafts today and with the canning it’s getting very warm in this house I’m going to have the ceiling fan on the windows the Breezeway door open and we’re going to let a little bit of that damp air circulate in here and you can’t let any
Drafts cold or otherwise hitting your jars because it can actually shock them and make them crack and if it were to like crack right open on your countertop that’s going to be a big mess I don’t want to have to deal with I’ve never had it happen but I’ve always taken these
Steps of caution putting them on a towel covering them up with a towel and leaving them under undisturbed for a day so as you saw I got another batch of jars ready and in the caner I had to add more water and get that up to temperature before I added the jars and
I still was short an inch um to have it 2 in high if it’s like a half an inch it’s almost an inch it’s just not enough for my security so I wanted to go ahead and add that so I had boiled another pot of water to pour on top before I set
Them down into it and let that water mix right up and get up to um a good hot temperature so adding extra water because now my second batch is only at four jars um total I am ending up with 12 jars that’s really great I’m actually going to stop for lunch process my
Zucchini because I keep putting it off and I got to get it done I processed a bunch put it in the freezer but I want to try mock pineapple um where you chop it up and put canned pineapple juice on it we’ve never done it before we basically eat pineapple um straight from
A can or raw or use it in smoothies so I’m just going to do a couple of them that way and Shred the rest for the freezer because we are constantly making banana bread and having to run to the store in the winter time for banana
Bread and I said if I could replace that cost of bananas with stuff from the garden like zucchini pumpkin I’m going to do it so more in that prepping and homesteading and getting away from going to the grocery store so these four are underwater couple minutes left on them
Let them cool and it’s on to the next thing while I’m doing my next thing you can hit up that playlist and you can go back and you can see that applesauce um apple butter video that might be one more thing I might be getting done today
But I’m trying to use as many pots in this house today as I can to just kind of keep things going while I took this rain day off so I’ll see you next time thanks for watching bye-bye
2 Comments
👏 👏 👏 go Mom Excellent video, thank you.
👍👍………….