Making Applesauce

Our new house has an apple tree and we picked a huge box of apples on Sunday. Since we're leaving for vacation tomorrow we had to do something with them. So we decided to try making applesauce. I made a batch last night with my mom at her house and got rid of half of the apples and then Ky and I worked through the rest of them today.

We started with one side of the sink completely full of apples. It filled this red bowl 3-4 times. The first step was to give them a good rinse.

Next, I quartered the apples and cut out any bad spots as well as the stems. I left the skin and core. I thought I was going to get away without seeing a single worm but then one appeared toward the end. Gross! Kyler thought it was funny that I was getting so grossed out by it. Anyway, after cutting all these apples, I am pretty sure my finger is going to blister. Kyler played with the quartered apples that were soaking and rinsing and called them his boats.

Next, I filled my stock pot a little over 3/4 full of apples and put them on medium-high heat. Once they got to cooking I turned the heat down to medium-low. I stirred a few time throughout the 25 minutes of cooking time. (I can tell you that other apple varieties take WAY longer than this to cook but the ones on our tree soften pretty quickly even though they don't seem that way when you cut into them.)

This is what the apples looked like when they were finished cooking. They were really mushy and the skins turned from green to yellow.

The next thing is to put the apples in the canning sieve. This belongs to my mom and was given to her by my dad's mother. I think I am going to buy hand crank strainer for next year since we still have tons of apples on the tree. And hopefully we will have some tomatoes in the garden to make juice out of too.

Here is the finished product. I think we probably got about 90-100 ounces in the end. The color on the above picture is a little more accurate - ours turned out to be the same color and generally the same texture as what you would buy in the store. We add a little sugar (about 1 cup for a batch this size) to finish it off.

Now we get to do it all over again next weekend when we finish picking the top of the tree.