Those Applesauce Days

Quite literally! I love making applesauce. It always feels more like fall when I get to go out and get apples from the orchard and make them into beautiful, delicious applesauce (using a secret family recipe, of course!)


I must say, though, that our #1 secret ingredient are the apples that my family grows. My family grows the some of the largest apples in the world, which were in the Guiness Book of World Records in 2000. The apple in it weighed nearly 3.5 pounds, (though, apparently (I just looked it up) we have been beaten (sigh!)). We tend to use the runts off the ground, since it doesn't matter if they are damaged or not. Either way it is really really tasty and far more preferable than the stuff you can buy in the store. They taste similar to a fuji and make great applesauce and great apple pies. They make a one apple apple pie. Pictured above are 3 of the apples next to a Nalgene bottle for scale.

Here is Blair working away. I use both of my crockpots (wedding gifts) and a pot on the stove. The applesauce will go to feed us through the winter and to make lovely applesauce pies at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Here it is cooking away. I completely forgot to take pictures of the final sauce, but I will soon.

This is all of it peeled and the rest of the apples waiting to be sliced up and put in the pot. We ran out of space in the pots and ran out of containers. So I sent Blair to the store to buy more. Usually I make it with my mom and she has tons of containers. Though I did make a little while I was in college in one of my crockpots. All together I estimate that we made about 5 quarts of applesauce from a little over a dozen apples. It's quite a good amount and should be more than plenty for us to eat. We had it last night over vanilla ice cream and it was delicious.