apple butter
It’s apple time again. This past week the world’s best ex-husband found bushels of locally grown apples for $8/bushel (knocked down to $7 a few moments later so they didn’t have to take stuff home), so he brought me three. I’m catering next Saturday, so two bushels will go to making things for that event, and one bushel is mine.
I’ve wanted to make apple butter for some time now and this was my golden opportunity. I checked a number of online sources and came up with a variation that reflects my personal tastes a bit more than what I was finding. This includes a significant drop in the amount of sugar that was used. The apples that I have are rather sweet on their own and I didn’t want to end up with an overly sweet product that no one in my house would eat.
Apple Butter
1 bushel of apples, peeled, cored, and sliced
2 cups of water
3 T ground nutmeg
3 T ground allspice
dash of cassia cinnamon
3 c granulated sugar
Place the apple slices in a pot on the stove. Add the water.
Boil until the apples are soft.
Using an immersion blender, blend everything to a bit finer than applesauce consistency. Reserve about 1/3rd of the applesauce.
Put the applesauce, spices, and sugar in a crock pot (you will need two, or split things into batches for one). Put on “high” and cook for about 12 hours (I did it overnight). This should reduce things by at least half. In the morning, split the reserved applesauce between the two crock pots and cook for another 8 hours on “high”. If the apple butter is too thick, add water or apple juice until you like the consistency. If the apple butter is too watery, remove the top from the crock pot and cook for a while longer, until enough liquid has boiled off to make it as thick as you like it.
I ended up with a seriously sticky mess, a bunch of apple butter, and hot apple butter on my toast this morning while I started canning the lot in 8oz jars. I’m considering another experiment using a bunch of pears from our CSA that I’ve not used as of yet just so they don’t go to waste.