Homemade Applesauce is Easy!

There’s no better comfort food in the world than warm, homemade applesauce. And once you’ve made your own, you’ll never be able to stomach another jar of store-bought applesauce again. I promise. The bonus is that making your own is simple. And the other bonus is that making your own applesauce will please your kids, impress your friends and make you feel as resourceful as Laura Ingalls. Everyone around you will be in awe. And they’ll want a bowl. Wait, and there’s one more bonus – it will save you money because store-bought applesauce is ridiculously overpriced!

We are in the throes of apple season right now. Apples are fresh, cheap, and plentiful. There are so many varieties available it’s overwhelming. I think the best applesauce comes from mixing lots of varieties together, and making applesauce from fresh apples you just picked yourself is pretty stellar too. When my kids were young we went to a pick-your-own farm each year.

Now when I suggest we go apple picking I get blank stares and “Why?”

Top Ten Reasons We Can

I had a hot date with my hubby last night. It got pretty steamy and altogether messy. We canned tomatoes until the wee hours. It’s that time of year. Twenty pints of pizza sauce and nine quarts of tomato sauce. And still the tomatoes keep coming.

We’re taking a break and moving on to peaches today. Bought a huge bushel of seconds peaches ready and ripe. This weekend’s date will involve skinning the luscious beauties and squeezing the pits out of them before we cook them in to peachsauce (just like applesauce only peaches and no sugar!), peach Barbeque sauce, and maybe some peach jam or syrup. It will definitely get sticky.

Canning can be a solitary endeavor, but it’s much more fun with company and music (and some wine). Sometimes when I’m elbow deep in the mess I wonder why we do this. It would be so much easier to buy tomato sauce at the store. And even if the price of organic tomato sauce can be dear, I’m fairly sure my time is worth just as much.

Inspired by my son's excellent blog, How To Kill Your Characters, (It’s all manner of musings on Dungeons and Dragons on the surface, but underneath it’s pretty philosophical and just plain good writing. He puts me to shame.) which is filled with Top Ten Lists, I present:

The Top Ten Reasons why I can each summer:


1 Popping the lid off a jar of tomato sauce in the dead of winter returns summer if only for a meal. All the flavors of five different heirloom tomatoes in one jar is divine. No can from the store, no matter how exclusive and expensive the brand, can compare.


2 My youngest child considers homemade peachsauce such a special treat, he opts for it over all manner of junk food.


3 Instead of empty calories and chemicals in store bought pancake syrup, we slop on homemade blueberry syrup any time of year not just special occasions.


4 Once you grow accustomed to homemade applesauce it’s pretty much impossible to eat that mealy mush they sell at the grocery store.


5  I feel connected to my mother and grandmother and all the women before them as I “put up” healthy, homegrown food for my family.


6 I can’t stand to waste anything. And I can’t stick to one kind of tomato or cucumber. How else could I keep from throwing all the extras on the compost pile?


7 I like cherries, blueberries, and peaches too much to eat them only a few weeks a year and I can’t bring myself to buy (or pay the price for) produce shipped from the other side of the globe in the dead of winter.


8 It may consume my time in the summer, but it saves me time in shopping trips to the store the rest of the year. We always have sauces, fruits, veggies, and jams on hand year round.


9 I get incredible nerdy satisfaction from hearing the jar lids “pop”, writing the contents on the lids, and lining them up neatly on the shelf.


10 It’s one tiny step I can take toward living more self-sufficiently. If I had my way we’d live off the grid on the side of mountain, but thankfully (for my kids at least), I married a man who enjoys the marvels of modern conveniences. Although he makes a damn fine lumberjack, I must say.

I hope you’re inspired to get canning yourself! If you need some tips or ideas check out some previous posts

Canning foibles, canning basics, canning tomatoes, applesauce , more canning ideas

Or locate a copy of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving – it will tell you everything you need to can anything. Canning isn’t rocket science, I promise. You can do this!

Homemade Applesauce, Anyone?

There’s no better comfort food in the world than warm, homemade applesauce. And once you’ve made your own, you’ll never be able to stomach another bottle of store-bought applesauce again. I promise. The bonus is that making your own is just about the easiest thing to do. And the other bonus is that making your own will impress your friends and families. They will be in awe. And they’ll want a bowl. Wait, and there’s one more bonus – it will save you lots of money because store-bought applesauce is ridiculously overpriced!

We are in the throes of apple season right now. Apples are fresh, cheap, and plentiful. There are so many varieties available it’s overwhelming. I think the best applesauce comes from mixing lots of varieties together, but making applesauce from fresh apples you just picked yourself is pretty stellar too. I try to get my kids out to a pick-your-own farm each year. There is nothing in the world like a fresh apple eaten moments after it is picked. Nothing. Don’t take my word for it – go find out.

Most fruit markets sell apple seconds. If it isn’t immediately apparent, ask someone about it. When you’re making applesauce, quantity is important and looks aren’t. I like to go to the seconds room and ask for a few bushels of mixed apples. I ask them to throw in every kind of apple they have except Red Delicious. Red Delicious may be yummy eating apples, but they make only mediocre sauce. A mix of varieties makes the taste much richer and more complex.

Making applesauce is not a precise science, so don’t get hung up on following a recipe. Personalize your own. All I do is core, peel, and slice enough apples to fill a big pot. Periodically, I splash a few squirts of lemon juice on the apples to keep them from turning brown. When my pot is full, I fill the bottom quarter of the pot with water and put it on the stove. Working on a medium-high setting, I bring the apples to a boil, mashing them with a spoon and stirring often. Once the apples are boiling, I turn down the heat a little and continue to mash them with a spoon or a potato masher.

Next I add sugar. Now, how much sugar you add is a completely personal decision. I add about ½ cup for a big pot, but you can add much more or none at all. A fresh mix of apples creates such an amazingly complex and sweet flavor that you probably don’t need anywhere near the amount of sugar most recipes call for. So if you’re following a recipe, cut the sugar in half and then taste. You might not need the rest.

I continue cooking and mashing occasionally until the mixture looks like applesauce. I’m not sure how long this takes. I promised myself I would pay attention last night when I made applesauce so I could be more precise in my instructions but then I got distracted preparing dinner and dealing with homework issues. It might have taken 15 minutes, but then again it might have been longer. All I know is there is a point where the apples become really easy to mash and the whole mixture suddenly looks like applesauce.

This is where I stop and move on to canning, freezing, or eating, but if you don’t like chunky applesauce (which is one of the qualities I love about homemade applesauce), you can now put your concoction through a food processor and eliminate all those chunks that make your kids say, “Did you make this?” Although, once your kids have tried real homemade applesauce warm from the pan with a sprinkle of cinnamon they’ll change their tune.

A great way to increase your kids’ enthusiasm for homemade applesauce is to enlist their help in the process. If you own an apple peeler/corer/slicer get your kids in on the action. We have a peeler/corer/slicer that attaches to the kitchen counter and the kids love to use it. They love to eat the long, curly apple peels. Most peeler/corer/slicers only work on perfectly shaped apples, so if your seconds are particularly assymetrical and/or overly ripe, don’t get too frustrated when the handy contraption doesn’t work. Then you just have to revert to the old fashioned knife to do the job.

We can some of our applesauce and freeze the rest in abandoned yogurt containers. Slightly thawed, frozen applesauce is a wonderful dessert treat. But the best way to eat it is still warm from the pan. I make applesauce in large batches in the fall, but I make smaller ones anytime I end up with a bunch of apples that are getting long in the tooth or being ignored in the bottom of the fridge. So don’t think you can only make applesauce when you have time for the big production it can become. Grab a little sauce pan and peel, core, and slice 3 or 4 apples. You do the same thing your do for a big batch, just modify your amounts. Fresh, warm applesauce makes a yummy side dish anytime.

A jar of homemade applesauce and a basket of apples is a wonderful gift for a teacher, friend, or new neighbor. If you don’t remember how to can see my post from July 15 for directions. Now that you know how easy it is, try making some homemade applesauce, not only will it be comfort food for your body, it’s comfort food for the soul too.

Waste Not Want Not

This weekend my refrigerator went on the fritz and froze everything in my fruit drawer (or maybe some kid, I’m not naming names here, messed with the temperature control). What to do, what to do. Never one to let anything go to waste, especially any expensive, organic, edible thing, I got busy. Luckily there wasn’t much in my fruit drawer this time of year. Not much is available if you’re particular about fruit that is local and organic. There were about 12 apples – the last of the local crop still available at the farm market. There was a bag of organic lemons that had been reduced for quick sale, and some grapes that I was talked in to buying when I broke my own rule and took a kid to the grocery store with me. So the damage wasn’t too bad. Still, I would never throw out good food so….

I thawed out the apples, peeled them and made some fresh apple sauce for dinner that night. The kids were so excited to have warm fresh applesauce, they ate the whole pot. If you’ve never had warm applesauce – try it some time. It’s one of my favorite tastes of fall, but you can make applesauce anytime. A friend stopped by to pick up her daughter while I was in the midst of making the applesauce and was amazed at how easy it is to make. She kept saying, “That’s all there is to it?” the entire time I was making it. She was so impressed that I worry there are others out there who don’t know how simple it is to make applesauce, so here’s the lowdown:

1. Peel and core apples and cut them in to slices (if you don’t like chunky applesauce, you can always pureed the sauce in a food processor after it’s cooked).
Put them in a big pot and add some water – just enough until you can see water amongst your apples, but not so much that it’s covering your apples.
2. Sprinkle a little lemon juice over the apples. You only need a splash, this is to keep it from browning too much and it acts as a preservative if you’re planning to store the applesauce for any length of time. Trust me, if you’ve got kids and you let them have some right after it’s made, there will be no need for storage.
3. Bring the apples to a simmer on med-high and cook until the water mostly evaporates and the apples turn to sauce and break apart easily. Stir the apples frequently so they don’t stick to the bottom, add more water if necessary. This can take some time, especially if you use too much water.
4. When it looks like applesauce, add as much sugar as you like. You won’t need much.
You can also add cinnamon if that’s your thing. I skip it.
Done. See? So easy.
Sweet-tart apples make the best sauce. I don’t recommend red delicious, but mixed with another kind they would be alright. You never need to toss apples – next time they get mealy, bruised, old, wrinkled, or frozen – make applesauce!

Next came the lemons. Not much to do with frozen lemons other than to thaw them out and make lemonade. Which is what my husband did. It was a rainy, miserable weekend so hot applesauce and cold lemonade were both pleasant surprises for all of us. I wasn’t as keen to save the grapes but my kids discovered that frozen grapes are fun to eat, so they didn’t go to waste after all.

Our adventures with the fruit drawer brought home an important part of living an affordable kid-friendly organic life – waste nothing! As much as I love composting, I would never throw something in there for later that I can use now. When the organic free trade bananas get too brown I peel them, break them in to sections and freeze them. Then anytime I want to make banana bread or banana milk shakes, I’ve got the perfect overripe bananas at the ready. I paid a small fortune for those bananas, heck if I’m gonna toss them out over a few brown spots.

When we come down to the ends of our bread or there’s just a couple slices left on the French bread loaf, I make croutons out of what’s left. Croutons are simple to make. Just cut the bread in to crouton size chunks. Spread them out on a cooking sheet. Spray them with olive oil and sprinkle with garlic powder. Bake at 200 for one hour and 30 minutes, then turn the oven off and let them cool inside the oven. Done. You can also make bread crumbs from the croutons if you need bread crumbs.

Nothing needs to go to waste. You don’t have to grow up in the Depression to know that, although I do think of my mom whenever I’m tucking another plastic container of bananas in to my freezer. She is never one to let anything go to waste and always leaves our house after Thanksgiving with the turkey carcass in the trunk. We let her have it because we know it will come back in the form of her famous homemade turkey noodle soup. Waste not, want not. So true.