Apple Sauce

My goal for Saturday was to make apple sauce. Things got off to a rather late start as I was with Bran and did engage in a bit more new apartment with him. I also finished the Max Sweater that morning.

So I didn't get out to my local awesome farm stand/market until sometime 2-3ish. I was hoping they might have gala or fuji apples but no suck luck. So I went with a half a bushel of Golden Delicious and half a bushel of Jonagold.

The back seat being occupied with a bunch of stuff for Bran the apples went into the trunk for the ride home. Alas this resulted in mass apple spillage through the trunk. D'oh.

The evening before I had purchased a new gadget that I thought might aid my process, an apple peeler. So I couldn't resist pulling it right out and giving it a whirl. It was amazing.

I then spent a bit of time trying out my new aproach and getting a feel for things, while also doing a bit of housework and blocking the sweater. This was a very very poor plan as inevitably the pot of apples that I left on the stove to soften boiled over while I was up pinning the sweater. I knew it was bad when I could smell burnt apples on my way back downstairs.

When the house was purchased back in January the first thing that happened was my Aunt and Uncle replaced the crazy old stove with a new amazing fancy one. It's a giant flat top and I love it. Burnt stuff on it is very very bad and muchly distressing to me. Eeek!

I already had about a quart and a half of sauce but I basically stopped my whole process and decided to clean the whole kitchen first. This gave the stove top some time to cool down so I could work more at cleaning off the burnt stuff and avoid any damage to the glass top. Plus it refocused me and gave me time to establish how I would run my operation.

At approximately 6PM I recommenced operations.

Here's my snazzy new peeler. the contraption could also core and slice, but I opted just to peel.

The dangling strands of peel were at times too much for Helo to resist.

I worked in batches of 6 apples, 3 of each kind. First I peeled them. Then I would slice off the skin remaining on the top and bottom. This also helped make a nice flat surface for using the slicer corer thing with the red handle there. I was working in batches (multiple ones at a time) so all of the slices then were left until the cooking pot was free.

The slices were put in a pot with some water to soften. As soon as they were soft they were scooped into the Foley mill and the next batch of slices went on the stove. Although make sure to change the water every 2 batches or so. The water gets very syrupy and bubbles over way too fast if you don't change it - not that I have experience with this or anything...

As the new slices were softening I was milling. Because there were already peeled and cored just about everything went through the mill. It saved me quite a bit of scooping out peel bits and fretting that maybe if i just mashed harder i could get more from this or that batch of left overs. It was great. The sauce then went into a big pot which I attempted to leave at a low boil. This was fairly unsuccessful as it tended to just find one place to bubble and project apple juice splatters all over the stove.

As soon as the milling was done, or if my arms were tired I would start alternating, I was back to the peeling/chopping/slicing. When there was a good bit of sauce in the pot and when I had a full 2 batches ready for cooking I would switch to filling the jars and putting a batch in the water bath.

The end result was 6 quarts, 11 pints, 4ish of the blue tupperware (a pint maybe) and one of the big tupperware which was already at Bran's new apartment when this photo was taken.