Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Making Applesauce

After going to the orchard on Monday and picking up a bushel of apples, we turned it into applesauce and apple butter yesterday! It was a LOT of work and took us over 3 hours. I don’t know how people make dozens of bushels worth of applesauce! One is plenty of work for us! J

It started with washing the jars, lids, and apples.
Then we peeled and chopped enough to make 4 loaves of apple bread (recipe coming on Saturday).
Josiah was very helpful with chopping.
You can see all of our canning and applesauce making supplies in this picture: our food mill, pots for boiling apples in, our canner, jars, and a strainer (as well as two willing bodies! J)
We washed. . .
. . . and chopped. . .
. . . and chopped some more! I like to call this “Mount Apple.” It makes me think of Mount Carmel in the Bible. A mountain made of caramel and apples would sure taste good right now!
After cutting the apples into 1/8’s, we boiled them skins, seeds, cores and all until they were soft and mushy.
Then we drained them. . .
. . . and put them through our food mill.
And out comes the delicious applesauce!
And we did this over, and over, and over, and OVER again.
Then it was into the canner to be processed.
The end result was 12 quart jars of applesauce. Three of these went into making crockpot apple butter, but the rest will be for eating all by itself!
And everybody’s favorite part: cleaning up! Well, not exactly a favorite, but a necessary part. We look forward to enjoying the fruits of our labor!

4 comments:

Sarah said...

What a fun fall day you all had making the applesauce! It does take a long time doesn't it?! But it is so worth it in the end. And it's always enjoyable when one can work together with your family when doing tasks like this. Enjoy your applesauce and apple butter! :)

Amy said...

And, actually making several bushels of applesauce at a time isn't as much work as it might seem. In my opinion, most of the work is getting everything out, setting it up and cleaning it up (and for these steps it takes almost as much work for one quart or for thirty quarts).

7 Eagles said...

It was indeed fun but a lot of work, Sarah! But it all is so tasty in the end. :-) And we will certainly enjoy the rewards of our labor, even though it all gets eaten so quickly!

~Bianca

7 Eagles said...

You're probably right, Amy. I think the part that got tiring for me was washing and cutting all of the apples. But if there had been more people helping with that part, it probably wouldn't have been as difficult.

~Bianca