Were you wondering why I put all of my applesauce into the crock pot? (No? That’s okay, I’ll tell you anyway.)

I made apple butter! It turns out, making apple butter in the crock pot is pretty darn easy. Once you’ve made your applesauce, just put it in your crock pot and add sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice to taste. (You can add any spice you like, really, but that’s what I used.) My crock pot holds about 7 quarts of applesauce, and I added about 2 1/2 cups of sugar, 2 tablespoons of cinnamon, and a teaspoon of allspice. At this point, essentially what you have is a really big tub of cinnamon applesauce.

Now, this next part you can do two ways. One: you can loosely cover the crock pot and leave it on ‘low’ overnight. (Stick a pair of knives or chopsticks under the edge of the lid to keep it from sealing all the moisture in. Don’t forget! You actually want the water to cook off here.) That would have worked really well for me, EXCEPT for the fact that my crock pot is oval in shape and has a couple of hot spots which resulted in a small amount of burning in parts.

The other thing you can do (this is what I did with my second batch) is to just leave the lid off, set it on low, and stir it occasionally throughout the day as you do other things. It takes hours to cook applesauce down into apple butter. It’s done when you reduce it by about half and it’s turned a rich brown color. If you’ve ever had apple butter before – it should look AND taste like apple butter. Yum.

You can put it in the fridge, freeze it, or can it. I’ve already put up fourteen pints of it (although I don’t have that many left) and it’s fortunate that my kids like it so much…because we just picked three more bushel of apples from Grandma’s farm yesterday.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you have a few bushel of free apples. (Pictured: not even a third of my apples.)

Greg’s grandmother has three mature apple trees that dump a giant crop of apples every other year. This is an apple year. For our preliminary harvest we picked a laundry basket and a large Rubbermaid bucket full of them. She doesn’t spray her apples (which is fine with us) so about two-thirds of the apples were spotty. What do we make with spotty apples?

Applesauce.

To make applesauce you will need:

• Apples
• Chopping equipment (you know, knife, cutting board)
• A really, really big pot (heavy bottomed is good)
• Some water
• A Foley Mill*

And that’s it!

*A Foley Mill is a special piece of equipment that looks like a saucepan with a perforated bottom and a crank in the middle. You can buy one for just over $25, and I suggest you do if you’re making a large quantity at all. You can still make applesauce without one…it’s just harder. As I’ve never made applesauce before I didn’t have one, but fortunately I was able to borrow one from Greg’s grandmother.

Directions

Wash your apples.

Put about one inch of water in the bottom of your pot. Chop the apples into quarters (removing stems, flower ends, and rotten or buggy bits) and pitch them in, cores, peels, bruises, and all. IF you are making applesauce without a mill, you want to remove ALL peels and cores/seeds BEFORE you put apples into the pot.

Cover your pot and begin cooking on high heat. Once the apples start boiling turn it down to medium so they don’t burn. Stir occasionally until they’re soft through and basically falling apart. How long this takes will depend on how many apples you’re cooking.

Yum? If you’ve cored and peeled your apples, you can just stir in the pot until it’s apple-saucy enough for you. If you have to strain out the peels and cores still, into the mill it goes.

Now just crank, crank, crank, crank. Don’t forget, though, the apple peels will tend to spread flat and cover the holes on the bottom, so you’ll need to reverse crank from time to time to scrape them back up. Once you’ve made it through all of your cooked apples (remembering to add in any liquid from the pot…that’s mostly juice), that’s it! It’s done!

And if you’re wondering why I milled my applesauce into a crock pot, just wait and see, hahaha!