Homemade Apple Sauce

I’ve found that the key to a really good apple sauce is a mix of apples. For apple chops or apple dumplings, you want to be fairly particular about what apple you use. Fujis are good, but red delicious wouldn’t be.  But for apple sauce? It really doesn’t matter, and I’ve found my favorite apple sauces come from really mixing it up.

We’ve got a mix of fujis, cameos, jonagolds, pink ladies, stayman and nittanys here, I think. This is going to be good.

Peel them, core them, and chop them into chunks. They can be pretty big chunks, I’ve found.

The secret ingredient in this recipe is the lemon. I’m holding two in this picture, but they ended up being very juicy so I only used one. First I zested it and then I juiced it into the pot.

Then add the rest of the flavorings. Sugar, brown sugar, some cinnamon sticks. You only need one cup of water, basically enough to cover the bottom of the pot. Stir everything together really good, cover, bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer for 30 minutes. The juices of the apples will add to that lone cup of water and pretty soon the whole mixture will be very juicy. Keep an eye on the pot. One year I was doing too many apples at once and didn’t realize how much juice they’d have. With just one cup of water the pot ended up boiling over!

Once it’s ready, you can mash it with just about anything, the apples will be so soft. Can you tell how good this is going to be.

I like to garnish with just a little bit of cinnamon and enjoy at least one hot bowl. The rest of it we freeze, and you can reheat over the course of the winter. This batch here was enough for 5 freezer bags with two or three heaping spoonfuls of apple sauce. (To unfreeze, we just put in a skillet with at most a tiny bit of water.)

Ingredients

• ← Maple Syrup Apple Chops
• Sweet Potato Sticky Buns (They Have Vegetables in Them So They’re Healthy?)* →