Applesauce! It is the very easiest, fastest, and one of the most delicious ways to preserve apples. It’s great whether you have a couple of trees’ worth of apples that you need to take care of in a hurry, or you want to take advantage of your local grocery store’s super sale on fruit, or you just have a sudden hankering for some smoothly stewed, lightly spiced fruit. One reason I love making applesauce is that there’s so little waste: I stew the apples without peeling or coring, and sieve the coarse pieces out in the final steps, so all the delicious apple flesh is saved — unlike in other methods, when some flesh necessarily is thrown out with the peel and core. You can make a big batch, as I do, to make canned applesauce (I end up with about six pints), or reduce the size and make just a small batch to keep in the fridge. Either way, the basic process is the same except for the actual canning.
Apple season is about over at our home. We’ve had apples coming out our ears this fall (speaking figuratively, of course), and I’ve used a lot of them in dried apples, jam, fruit leather of various types (all including apples), and an earlier batch of applesauce. A week ago, Aaron informed me he was commandeering the remainder of our apple harvest for pressing juice to brew a “hoppy” cider, so I preempted the coming reduction in produce by gathering a collection of attractive ones to make one more batch of dried apples and a batch of my own recipe of Harvest Apple jam, and filled a big pot with apples for a cooking up a final batch of applesauce. Today I’m finally finishing that one last batch of applesauce (the stewed apples have been sitting in the fridge while I’ve been battling a week of migraines), and now I’m sharing with you this easy, scrumptious fall-time favorite. Mmmm, mmmm, good! Oh, and in case you wondered, I left plenty for Aaron. He got four gallons of juice for his cider.
Before I launch into the applesauce recipe, two disclaimers, if you will. First: despite my background, growing up in a subsistence lifestyle — living alternately on a religious commune, a trapline, and back on the commune — and spending that time baking and cooking and preserving for all I was worth, I am not an expert on canning and preserving. I was a kid during that time, following other people’s instructions. My memories are a bit foggy, and I don’t have recipes from back then. My knowledge comes from picking my mom’s highly experienced and knowledgeable brain, begging my gardening and cooking friends on Facebook for advice, reading cookbooks like The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, scouring the Internet for ideas, and obsessively reading the FDA and USDA’s online pages and various university-hosted pages on home preserving safety, methods, and recipes. I’m sharing my newfound knowledge with you because I’m having so much fun learning about canning and making food, and I’m the kind of person who can’t not share what I know. Once a teacher, always a teacher — and combined with a predilection for writing, this is what you get. This blog is a record of my journey in gardening and home preserving, not a declaration of my expertise.
Second: Despite not being an expert, I have done my research. Recipes like this depend on a certain acidity level to be safe for canning. If you wish to modify my recipe, please please please do your own research before changing it in some way such as adding large amounts of water or mixing in other fruit. Apples are safe for canning on their own, without adding lemon juice for acidity, but if you want to change things up, make sure you check out some of the links I provided above before you do anything drastic.
And now some general words on canning. Those of you who have read others recipes of mine, you know how I operate: I explain stuff a lot. I’m an overexplainer. If you want to skip all that, just scroll. Keep scrolling. A little more… There you go. You’ll find the actual applesauce recipe and processing instructions near the bottom. You’re welcome. (But don’t blame me if you miss something essential as you skim downward.)
Before you begin, make sure you have all your tools and materials ready. For this type of canning — called water bath, boiling-water, or hot pack canning — you don’t need a real pressure canner. You just need a pot big enough to hold all your jars, with a rack on the bottom to elevate them so they don’t contact the pot, and deep enough that the water can cover the jars by a full inch with plenty of room to boil. I do use a pressure canner, because it’s hard to find another pot that’s big enough to fit the above criteria, and because it makes me feel like I’m doing something exciting, but I have so far never used it for pressure canning — I just use it as a giant pot for boiling water. I’ll be honest: the idea of actual pressure canning scares me. It would scare you, too, if you’d ever walked into a kitchen covered ceiling to floor in exploded jar and green bean fragments.
You need a few tools besides the large pot or canner, too. You can get most of these together in a set at a farm store like Wilco, at your local grocery store during canning season, or in an online search at many shopping sites. Besides your jars, the most essential tool is a set of canning tongs. These tongs have a curved, rubberized gripper that’s just right for grabbing hot jars and moving them in and out of boiling water, and the positioning of the handle is such that you can pour water out of them after sanitizing without scalding yourself. As I said, essential. Nearly as essential is a wide-bottomed funnel, which will help you fill jars without drips.
A less important, but still handy, tool is a magnetic lid lifter (useful for lifting flat lids out of hot water when you’ve sanitized them), or — my preference — a lid rack with a long handle, which you can lower into the recently-boiled water in your canner after sanitizing your jars, while you fill them. You also need something with which to release air pockets when you’re making foods like pickles, though it’s slightly less necessary with something like applesauce. A canning set comes with a flat plastic tool for this purpose, with one end notched for measuring the space at the top of the jar in case you’re obsessed with perfection. A butter knife works perfectly well if you don’t feel like purchasing a whole set of canning tools.
Jars, of course, are truly essential. For our family, pint jars (either widemouth or narrow-mouth) are just right for applesauce — I’ve found that if I use quarts, we use about half a jar immediately once one is opened, and then it sits in the fridge and molders. We end up wasting a lot that way. So I sacrifice a bit of shelf space and use the smaller pint jars. In terms of canning safety, it really doesn’t matter whether you use pints or quarts.
To can safely without risk of bacteria growing in your food, you need to start with sanitized jars. A lot of people recommend sanitizing your jars in the dishwasher, but I don’t like this approach, and here’s why: 1) If your dishwasher is running to sanitize your jars, you can’t use it to hold your dirty dishes while you prep your food. 2) You need to heat your canner full of water anyway so that you can water bath your jars full of food, and you might as well take that energy to sanitize the jars at the same time. 3) Your dishwasher doesn’t get as hot as a boiling pot of water. If your jars aren’t thoroughly sanitized, you need to process the food-filled jars longer — and the less you process the food, the better the flavor and the quality.
That’s why I start my canning sessions by placing my clean, lidless, pint jars into the canner –as many as the recipe suggests (in this case, six) plus another one just in case — and filling the jars and canner with water to at least an inch above the top of the jars, making sure there’s room for the water to boil. Then I put the lid on, place the canner on the largest burner, and turn the heat on high. It takes quite awhile, on my elderly cooktop anyway, for the canner to heat — sometimes I’m nearly done prepping the food before it’s done heating. When it does boil, I turn the heat down a bit and make sure it boils for at least ten minutes before I turn the heat off.
I leave the jars in the canner to stay hot, away from dust, and out of drafts until I’m ready to fill them. They need to stay hot because you’ll be filling them with hot food; you don’t want to pour hot food into cool jars, because there’s a chance they could break or become stressed (and break later). Ditto with hot jars sitting in a draft. You want them away from dust because dust can disrupt a good seal. So just leave them in the canner, where they’ll be safe, and you’ll have more counter space for working as well. Win-win.
Unlike the jars, you don’t want to boil the lids — boiling can degrade the rubber seal. If you have a nice lid rack like mine, you can lower the lids into the canner after you take the jars out, or once the canner stops boiling if you have room in the canner. This will sanitize them as much as they need, and will soften the rubber to ensure a good seal. If you don’t have a long-handled rack, put the lids into a shallow dish, pour some of the hot water from the canner over them so they’re all covered, and let them sit while you fill the jars. This is where that magnetic lid lifter comes in handy, so you can lift them out without burning your fingers. Otherwise, of course, you can pour the hot water off right before you’re ready to put them onto the jars.
On the topic of jar lids: I’m a very thrifty person. I reuse whatever I can. The one thing I don’t reuse is flat jar lids for canning. Why? Because I know that the heating process the lids undergo when the food-filled jars have been boiled for canning will begin to degrade the rubber seal. It may not be visible immediately, but it’s happening. Reused jar lids may seem to seal just fine, but might slowly lose their seal over time as the jars sit on the shelf, allowing the food to spoil. If this happens, the best-case scenario is that you lose your hard-won preserved food; the worst-case scenario is that the spoilage doesn’t leave any noticeable signs, and your family gets sick with food poisoning. So, please don’t reuse your jar lids. Additionally, as you’re counting out your brand-new, unused jar lids, check the rubber seal for any damage. If there are scratches or bubbles in the seal, throw them away. And if you, like me, save your used lids for casual food storage, double-check that you don’t have any damaged lids that accidentally got mixed in with your brand-new boxed ones — if the lids are bent or warped in any way, throw them away.
You need one more tool for making applesauce that’s not part of the general canning tool set. Exactly what this tool might be depends on your budget and the frequency with which you do this sort of thing. You need something for squashing apples. If you use my approach of not peeling or coring, you need something like a Foley food mill, a Kitchen Aid (or whatever brand you prefer) fruit and vegetable strainer attachment, or a chinois. If you don’t want to invest in a special tool, you could just use a potato masher or a blender — but you’d need to start by peeling and coring your apples first. Last year I used a food mill, and it was much better than my previous approach of pressing the apples through a sieve with a wooden spoon — but it was still fairly labor intensive. This year we splurged on a set of Kitchen Aid attachments, and using the fruit and vegetable strainer attachment has been heaven: so easy.
Now that you’ve patiently endured all my thoughts on canning, you’re ready to make applesauce! Start by collecting your fruit, about 8 pounds of apples. Eight pounds of whole apples fills up my tallest cooking pot to the brim, which is exactly how I determined how much I needed for a batch of applesauce. It does not matter what kind of apples you use. It really doesn’t. If you use super tart apples, you can add a bit more sugar to sweeten it to taste; if you use sweet ones, use less sugar. My personal approach, since I’m using apples from our own trees, is to choose the ugliest apples: misshapen, bruised, dented, tiny, whatever makes them undesirable for other uses. This approach might work if you’re buying from a U-Pick farm, too — you may be able to get a discount if you offer to take battered fruit off their hands. The point is, the appearance doesn’t matter for applesauce, and since you’re not peeling or coring, you may as well use up the ones that will be difficult or time-consuming to peel for other purposes. We have two trees, one that produces apples that might be Golden Delicious and one that produces pretty red apples with green streaks, much more tart than the yellow ones at their ripest. I don’t bother separating the two varieties for applesauce. I just choose the ugliest, and go from there.
Begin by cleaning the apples thoroughly: give them a rinse, and then fill your sink with water and dump the apples in for a good soaking. Even an organic orchard uses some kind of pesticide; just because it’s approved for organic use doesn’t mean you ought to eat it. Besides, who knows what kind of bug poop and bird spit might be on there? So wash those apples, no matter where you got them.
If you don’t have a tool for straining the peels, cores, and seeds out, you’ll need to start by peeling and coring the apples, in which case I strongly recommend an inexpensive ($20) tool like this:
Otherwise, just cut each apple into halves or quarters, even the tiniest ones, and drop them into your largest pot. Cutting them serves two purposes. First of all, it helps them cook down faster and gets the juice flowing and the flavors mixing. Yum. But — and more importantly — it lets you see the inside of the apple before you put it into the pot. If you’re using beautiful, shiny, grocery store apples, this is a less crucial factor. If, however, you’ve chosen the ugliest apples from your own trees — or even fairly attractive ones — slicing them open is beyond essential; it is absolutely imperative. Allow me to illustrate:
While you’re cutting, keep in mind that they don’t need to be pretty. Bruises are okay. If you see a wormhole, just cut it out. If half the apple is bad, cut off the bad half and toss the good half into the pot. It doesn’t matter; it’s all going to cook down into mush.
When your apples are all cut and in the pot, give your pot a good look. Is there room for boiling and stirring? If not, now is the time to grab another large pot and dump half the batch into the second pot. That original eight or so pounds of apples, now quartered and bad parts cut off, fills my tall pot about to the handles, which gives me all the room I need to stir. If it were fuller than that, I’d need to cook it in two batches.
Pour in two cups of water to keep your apples from sticking and get the juices flowing. If you’re doing two batches, a cup in each pot is just right. Next, add no more than 1/2 cup of sugar for tart apples, or use 1/4 cup of sugar if your apples are sweeter. You could even skip the sugar and wait till the end to decide how much to sweeten your applesauce. I like adding sugar at the beginning because it helps pull the juice out of the apples, which in turn creates more liquid in the pot, making the apples cook down faster. Add 1 tablespoon of cinnamon and 1 teaspoon of nutmeg. Other spices that might go well with applesauce, but that I don’t usually use, are allspice, cloves, and ginger. I generally just stick with cinnamon and a dash of nutmeg so that the fresh taste of apple is the starring flavor.
Set your pot on the stove on high heat with a lid, give it a stir to mix in the sugar and spices, and let it heat until you hear boiling. Give it a good stir, bringing the soft apples up from the bottom and letting the firm ones on top drop down. Turn the heat down to medium and let it keep on cooking, covered. Stir it thoroughly every fifteen minutes or so. You’ll know the apples have cooked long enough when they are uniformly mushy, and none of them hold their shape when poked. With a giant pot like I use, this takes about an hour. If you use smaller pots it won’t take as long.
When your apples are cooked, this is a good time to start your canner and jars heating as I described above.
Let the apples cool just a little before you sauce them so you don’t get burned. Put them through whatever type of food mill you have, or — if they’re peeled and cored — mash them up, or puree them in small batches in the blender. If you’re using the blender, fill it no more than halfway; drape a towel over the lid; hold the lid down very tightly; and start the blender at a low speed before moving up to puree speed. Pureeing hot food in a blender can be a trifle hazardous if you don’t take precautions.
If you’re using the Kitchen Aid fruit and vegetable strainer attachment, here’s some advice: No matter how badly you want to try reusing the rejected coils of apple junk that oozes out of the end of the attachment, do not — I repeat, DO NOT — put that stuff back through the strainer. You may think you can be extra thrifty and get some more applesauce out of it if, perhaps, you mix it with water to soften it. No. Don’t do it. You will have strainer pieces flying across the kitchen, fruit splattering your cupboards and counter, and rock-hard fruit matter that you’ll have to pry out of the innards of the strainer. Just don’t. I know that if you grew up in a family or culture that reuses everything and throws out nothing, it hurts to see that apparently useful fruit in the bowl waiting to be thrown out. If it’s too much to bear, find another use for it. Feed it to the chickens. Let the puppy eat it. Just…don’t put it through the strainer a second time. Baaaaaad idea.
However you achieve your transition from stewed apples to applesauce (and I highly recommend the Kitchen Aid strainer; I think a good, sturdy chinois would be second-best, with a food mill like my own coming in third), it’s now time to taste and reheat. This is the time to decide whether you want more (or any) sugar, if it needs more cinnamon, et cetera. These decisions don’t affect canning safety. You can sweeten and season to your heart’s content. You’ll find, I think, that most apples need very little sweetening; a quarter to a half cup of sugar for eight pounds of apples really is about right.
As you ponder sweetening choices, you should be reheating your applesauce. Bring it to a boil over medium-high heat, then turn it down to medium and let it boil gently, stirring occasionally, for a minute, paying attention to consistency. If it’s very thick and gloopy, drizzle in a bit of water until it’s smooth, continuing to heat it till it’s come back up to a boil. I realize this sounds vague and imprecise. That’s because the thickness of the applesauce will depend somewhat on the variety, ripeness, and quality of your apples. So you may need to add a little water, or you may not need to add any at all. Just make sure it’s easy to pour and boils easily without making big thick pops; otherwise it may not heat evenly in the canner, and you can’t be sure it’s been heated all the way through to a safe temperature.
Once the applesauce has boiled, lay a towel out on your counter — remember, it’s not a good idea to put hot jars onto a cool surface — close the window — because hot jars don’t like drafts — and lift the jars out of the canner onto the towel. Keep the water at its original level in the canner by pouring some of the water from the jars back into the canner, and some out into the sink. If you have a long-handled lid rack, lower it into the hot water once the jars are out. If you don’t, pour some of the hot water from a jar over the lids in a shallow pan.
Use a wide-bottomed funnel to guide you as you pour the applesauce into each jar, leaving 1/4 inch of space at the top of each jar. If you’re not sure you’re leaving enough headspace, this is a good time to use that notched green tool that came in the canning set you may have bought. You can also now use that tool to give each jar a zig-zag stir, to release any air bubbles inside. Or you could just give each jar a couple of good thumps on your toweled counter. If necessary, top off any jars that had large bubbles and have now lost fullness. By the way: Do you see how thick that applesauce is in the photos below? Notice the bubbles in the jar? That applesauce is just a trifle too thick — not so much that I was in a panic upon noticing it, but really I should have thinned it as I explained two paragraphs above to make sure it heated evenly in the canner.
Get a damp paper towel or clean cloth. Carefully wipe the rim of each jar, using a fresh area for each jar, making sure there are no stray splashes of applesauce remaining on the edge that could disrupt the seal. Once all the jars have been wiped, place a flat lid onto each jar, checking for flaws as you go and discarding any that have problems (of course, you already did this once, but perhaps you’re as paranoid as I am). Then place the rings and tighten them down. Turn the heat on under the canner, and use the tongs to lower the jars into the water. Replace the lid and bring the canner back to a boil.
Process the jars for ten minutes. Just to be clear, the timer for water bath processing begins when the water boils, not when you put the jars into the canner. After ten minutes, use the tongs to pull the jars out and place them back onto the towels. Do not touch the tops of the lids. You should hear the gentle, musical pop of lids sealing fairly soon, but some jars could take up to 24 hours. I repeat, do not touch them while you wait. If you push the center down, causing a “forced seal,” it’s impossible to know whether that jar would have sealed on its own or not. So don’t touch them until they have all sealed and are thoroughly cooled, at which point you should be sure to write the contents and date on stick-on labels for each jar. Home-canned food can easily keep for a year.
If any jars don’t seal after 12 to 24 hours (or if you disregarded my stern command to not touch the jars, thus causing a forced seal), you have two choices. You could reheat the canner to boiling with the jars inside (I would gently unseal the forced-sealed ones first, using thumbs to push the lid off rather than a can opener, then put the lids back on), process for 10 minutes at boiling, and leave them again to see if they’ll seal. Or you could shrug and take what is most likely your single unsealed or force-sealed jar and put it into the fridge, where it will be the first jar of applesauce you’ll try out.
Applesauce is a perfect fall treat, but with apples available year-round in grocery stores, you could make this any time. It’s great for kids’ lunch boxes, as a side with roasted pork and sauerkraut, and myriad other uses. Enjoy!
A Bright Ray of Hope 