HOMEMADE APPLESAUCE

Use your just picked apples to make an all natural treat!

Making your own homemade applesauce

There are some things we are so used to seeing in packaged form we never consider making it at home. I think applesauce is like that. But you might want to try making some. It’s really easy to make at home and worth the little bit of time it takes. I made my first batch of homemade applesauce in cooking class in school, just a few and a few more years ago.

I always have fresh apples on hand during apple season because I love going to the orchard to pick them. On an autumn day I love being in an apple orchard. I talk about why I love being there it in my post Apple Picking Time. Once home, I have to do something with all those apples I picked! Homemade applesauce is a quick and easy way to use a few apples, get creative and enjoy the fruits of my labor. 😋 (pun intended)

Why bother making it?

If you need to ask that question you probably have never tasted homemade applesauce. Making your own takes more time than opening a store bought container for sure. But homemade applesauce doesn’t take very long to make and is so so much better than store bought, especially while it is still warm. And it’s a sweet treat you can feel good about eating whether you are having it as a side dish, snack or dessert.

Making your own homemade applesauce is probably not something you are going to do on a regular basis. I certainly don’t. But during apple picking time when you have some apples on hand it’s a great seasonal fruit dessert. And if you haven’t picked the apples yourself they are always priced to sell at grocery stores and fruit stands in the fall when they are abundant.

Want to make your homemade applesauce even better? It is off the charts good with ice cream. I like it with vanilla ice cream but I just know it would be great with butter pecan or caramel or any number of other flavors. It’s such a treat!

Making it your way

Use ingredients you like

Applesauce only needs a couple of ingredients; apples and a liquid to steam them in. Any other ingredients give the applesauce more sweetness or flavor. You can use flavors you like.

You can choose what apples you want. They all have a different taste. Some are sweet and some are tart. If you have a favorite apple make the sauce with that. I like making it with a mix of varieties. Unlike some recipes where it is better to use apples that will stay somewhat firm when you cook them, in applesauce they all work. It’s okay if they fall apart when cooking, you are going to mash them up anyway.

You can add a host of sweeteners. Use natural sweeteners like maple syrup or honey in your applesauce, white or brown sugar, a sugar substitute OR no sweeteners at all! For this homemade applesauce recipe we are going natural and using maple syrup. It’s a perfect pairing for apples. I like that it is a 100% pure natural product and it adds fantastic flavor too. It’s a win, win for me.

When cooking with apples people usually think of adding favorite warm fall spices like cinnamon or nutmeg, ginger, cardamom or cloves. Pick and choose from any of them and you can’t go wrong.

Like so many other recipes, there are no wrong choices when you use ingredients and flavors you like.

Make it chunky or smooth

You can make your applesauce silky smooth, leave chunks of apples in it or anything in between. We are going to mash the apples when they get soft just like you would potatoes. If you want it as smooth as store bought, put your finished applesauce in a food processor to get your desired consistency. I like soft warm chunks of apples in mine.

You can also decide whether you want it juicy or more condensed to make it thicker. That is all up to you. It’s only a matter of how long you cook it after your apples are mashed.

Here’s What we are going to use:

These are the ingredients I gathered for this batch of applesauce.

Apples

Use any kind you want. I am using a variety of what I have on hand; a couple of granny smith apples, a couple of red delicious and some pink lady apples. Not all apples are the best for making pies or even cobblers because they get mushy when they cook. But we don’t care about that in this recipe. We are going to mash them up anyway. Later you will see the difference in the cook time and texture of different varieties in one of our cooking pictures. Some kinds of apples melt down on their own and some maintain their shape. take longer to get tender and need to be mashed. It’s all good in applesauce.

How many?

I usually use 6-8 apples for a batch. I use my big 8 cup measuring bowl and fill it with chopped apples. It might look like a lot in the bowl, but apples have a lot of water content. When the water cooks out this batch will make about 3 cups, more or less depending on how chunky or smooth you make the finished applesauce.

TIP: If you are adapting the spices to your own taste keep the combined amount to about 1 or 1 + 1/2 teaspoons so you don’t overpower the mild taste of the apples. If you are using something strong like cloves you should use even less.

Maple syrup

Once fall arrives I hit the maple syrup hard. Maple syrup is a natural pairing for apples and squashes. It’s fantastic in baked goods and it can be used as a unique ingredient in a savory dish like our PORK CHOPS APPLES AND ONIONS.

You need to get the real stuff though. Especially in cooking you should use 100% pure maple syrup, not the other stuff commonly found on grocery shelves. You are going to know which is real and which is not by the price tag.

Real maple syrup is a limited commodity. It starts as the sap of a maple tree and there’s only one season that the maple tree gives up sap to harvest. That is spring. The nights have to be cold and the days need to be warm or the sap is not produced by the tree. Among those harvesting maple sap the buzz phrase for time to harvest is “the sap is running”. The sap runs on the weather’s whim, not by our calendars.

There’s a lot of plain old grunt work to get the sap from the woods to the sap house. It’s quite time consuming to boil sap to syrup and it also takes lots of heat to keep the evaporator hot enough to boil. The average small harvester uses wood as fuel to heat the evaporator. With what it takes to make a quart of real maple syrup it’s reasonably priced.

Real maple syrup is one of the healthiest natural sweeteners you can use and a little goes a long way.

The other stuff

When you look at the label of those common imposters, you will note that it never ever says it is maple syrup, because it isn’t. The description of pure maple syrup is protected from fraudulent use. The imposters will be called maple flavored. They are usually high fructose corn syrup, which is corn syrup in its most unhealthy state, vaguely flavored with a maple extract. There are all kinds of other additives too. If you read the ingredients, you may never want to feed it to your family again.

That stuff is made to be sweeter than sweet. You would be better off melting some white sugar in water adding some maple extract and pouring it on your pancakes. It would be heathier.

Steaming liquid

I usually use cider or apple juice as the steaming liquid. It boosts the apple flavor a bit and adds a little sweetening too. You can use water if you don’t have apple juice or cider. The cider I am using is not pure pressed cider it’s not in season yet. Pressed cider is my preference though. The fresher the better. It’s best when bought right at the apple farm.

Flavoring

You don’t need to add any spices at all. Applesauce made with apples, cider or apple juice and maybe a little of something to sweeten it is great on it’s own. But if you want to add more fall flavors you most definitely can. With spices added it tastes more like apple pie filling than bottled applesauce from the store.

I am adding some fresh ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg. Fresh ginger has a bright and fresh flavor. I use it quite often. To find out more about ginger we have a cooking tidbit Using Ginger fresh and ground. Any of the fall spices you like, you can use. Cloves, cardamom, pumpkin pie spice are also great with apples. Because apples have a mild flavor, be conservative with stronger spices like cloves. As a general rule I would say you should start with a total combined amount of 1 teaspoon or 1 1/2 teaspoons of spices or less. We are adding them at the end. You can always add more when you taste test.

You can add a touch of vanilla to accentuate the apple flavor. You could even add a smidge of spiced rum or apple liqueur as a flavoring. If you are using an alcohol for flavoring, put it in when the apples are boiling down so the alcohol content will evaporate out.

The possibilities are boundless. As always, the only rule of thumb is to use ingredients you like! Then you know you are going to enjoy the finished product.

Here we go 👩‍🍳🍎🍏

Preparing the apples

Preparing apples for applesauce is the same as it is for most apple recipes. You need to get the core out, peel the apples and slice or chop them.

Apples start turning brown soon after they are cut. It doesn’t effect the flavor so in some recipes the browning doesn’t matter much. But since I am making applesauce and the color of the finished product may be effected, After I have cored, peeled and sliced the apples I am going to put them in cold water that has a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice added. It doesn’t have to be freshly squeezed lemon juice. Bottled lemon juice is fine but make sure you get 100% pure lemon juice. Lemonade won’t work. The acid in the lemon stops the apples from browning.

There’s a name for that

This technique of using an acid in cold water to keep a fruit or vegetable from browning is referred to as “acidulating“. In your cooking journey you may bump into words like that. If you have never seen or heard it before, of course you are going to stop short and wonder what the heck does that mean? Fancy terms like that can be the reason people think they don’t know enough to cook. That’s why I introduce words such as acidulate with an explanation in our recipes.

Another handy tip to know about lemon juice

Did you know that you can make buttermilk from everyday dairy milk by adding lemon juice or vinegar? That’s a handy thing to know. You use 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar for each cup of milk.

Buttermilk is a common ingredient in baking. I don’t usually have buttermilk on hand, so unless I have planned ahead to make a recipe that calls for it, I use this handy tip.

Since I am usually baking a sweet treat when I need buttermilk, I use lemon juice most often. When it is added to the milk it thickens and small soft curds form. If a baked good recipe calls for buttermilk, don’t use milk without adding an acid to it. The acid is needed to interact with the leavening agent that will make your baked goods rise.

Back to our apples 🍎

Get the core out and peel

When you are working with a round fruit or vegetable that you are going to be cutting from top to bottom, cut the bottom end off so you can place it (apple in this case) flat on the surface you are cutting on. It is more stable. It’s much safer than trying to balance and cut at the same time.

There’s a lot of ways to cut the core out

An apple corer and slicer

Cut off the bottom of the apple so it can sit flat on the cutting surface. Center the round hole in the cutter over the top where the stem was. That’s where the core is. Once positioned, hold the tool by the handles and push straight down into the apple all the way to the bottom. You may need to rock it back and forth to push it through.

Cut the apple in quarters

As shown below, you can use a paring knife for the whole job. This is the way I do it. It is easier for me. I cut the bottom off so it sits flat on the cutting surface and peel the skin off. Then I cut the apple in quarters and cut out the core from each of the quarters.

Slice around the core

You can cut the apple into pieces around the core too like in the picture below. You cut the top and bottom off, peel the apple and then cut pieces off around the core.

Time to make the Applesauce

Steam the apples

Use a large saucepan

Add the cider and chopped apples to a good sized saucepan. We are using the cider as a steaming liquid. We don’t need to use a steaming basket for this because we want the liquid to be absorbed into the apples. On medium high heat get the cider hot enough to start steaming. Then put the cover on the saucepan and turn the heat down to medium low and steam the apples until they are tender.

Stir the chopped apples frequently to make sure all the pieces are getting cooked evenly. Also check to make sure there is still enough steaming liquid in the pan to prevent the apples from sticking to the bottom. If your liquid has evaporated to the extent you are worrying about sticking, just add a little more water or whatever liquid you are steaming with.

Depending on the size of the apple pieces and what apples you are using, the apples will take 15-20 minutes to get tender.

Different apples different texture

Mash

Start mashing the apples while they are still on the heat when they are really tender. Stop mashing when you reach your desired texture. If you have more moisture in the applesauce than you want, turn the stove up to medium or medium high and get the applesauce to a slow boil and stir continually as the liquid evaporates.

Add sweeteners, spices and any other flavoring

Serve