A cooking and baking journal

Apples Matter -- Canning Homemade Applesauce

1/22/10: Canning Applesauce

During the week, Annemarie made some applesauce meatloaf (applesauce makes the BEST meatloaf, don't you know) and I discovered that we were out of our homemade canned applesauce. Uh oh! So on Friday I was ready to stockpile.

I chose to use a combination of our Jonathan and Northern Spy varieties. We kept them in the cooler since Fall and they are still very crisp and easy to peel! Yay! I also decided to make a few pints of apple butter because, well. . . I just love that stuff. :)

Some Notes for Rebekah: I used the baking and electric beater method for the apples. The oven temperature hovered around 350F and it took about three and a half hours to bake. No problem with that because I didn't have to keep a close eye on them! I used two of the steamer trays (a large and small) and I kept on refilling them as time went on. I used the hot water bath to can and they need 20 minutes in the bath. I filled them up leaving 1/2" headspace. I made about 9 and 1/2 quarts of sauce and about 4 pints of apple butter. All of them sealed. I used the apple butter recipe (one recipe only) found on simplyrecipe.com and I omitted the cloves and lemon and used only 1 cup of sugar.

I tried the apple sauce and I can honestly say that the Jonathan and Northern Spy work wonderfully together. There is never a need to add a teaspoon of sugar when these two come along!













My sister Catherine sent me these pics via email and left a note along with them. It read, "Sweat and tears were put into each and every one of these jars." :) Aw, that's sweet. Usually you will find those two evident during the canning process but because it is January I was glad to have a warm, sauna-like kitchen this time!





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