Last fall I found a great deal on bulk apples and asian pears at our local apple orchard, Oregon Heritage Farms which is just a couple miles from my home. Being the obsessed person that I am, I took home about 80 pounds of a combination of apples and asian pears. The combination of the two made great apple/pear sauce that we have been eating all year!
Tips for making Applesauce
- Buy from a local farm if possible. Ask if they have a ‘damaged’ bin of apples. Most places will sell apples with a bruise or two on it for half the price of an unblemished apple. This is a great deal if you’re planning on making sauce anyway and if you only have to cut off a spot or two on the apple.
- Don’t throw away your trimmings and cores! Make apple core (a.k.a ‘fruit scrap’) vinegar. It’s one of those recipes that takes almost no additional time and pays off big.
- You may not need the amount of maple syrup called for in the recipe if you’re using a combination of sweet and tart apples, or apples and pears. Taste before you sweeten. I needed no sweetener at all for my sauce.
- This makes a great dessert topped with whipped cream. Also great mixed with plain yogurt, which is what I’ve been doing all year with mine. The yogurt looks a bit weird but tastes great!
- I did not pass my apple-pear sauce through a food mill, but used a stick blender in the pot to mix the sauce up, peels and all. This made it super easy and less time consuming. You can faintly detect tiny pieces of peel in my sauce though, which doesn’t bother my family at all.
Applesauce (or Apple-Pear Sauce)
Rating: 4 forks (key)
Difficulty:
Easy but time consuming. Involve the kids!
Page in NT: 541
Ingredients:
1/2 case organic tart apples or asian pears (about 20 pounds)
juice of 2 lemons
1 cup maple syrup
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
Preparation:
Photo courtesy of Nedral on Flickr
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
I love the idea for an apple/pear sauce. We eat alot of applesauce and I use it in my favourite crunchy granola recipe.
http://muminbloom.blogspot.com/2010/07/recipe-crispy-crunchy-lumpy-applesauce.html
Great recipe above and I’m certainly going to try it. Thanks for the inspiration and tips
You mentioned eating it with yogurt – if you like cottage cheese, it’s also very good swirled in that.
Yummy! I prefer my applesauce really thick, so I don’t use water. Also, I add butter to mine… but then again, I add butter to almost everything these days. LOL.
LOL! I made this just last night. I used the last of the bag of local apples I bought a couple of weeks ago that were looking a bit soft and wrinkly. Used the stick blender, too. It tasted great with my lunch today, leftover pork tenderloin.
I’ll have to try it with butter. That sounds yummy!
I just picked two big bags of apples from our tree. This will be perfect!
Heck, I just throw my cored and chopped apples and some cinnamon in the crockpot over night. It’s chunky and naturally sweet!
How did you prepare the apples before cooking if you weren’t going to use a mill/strainer? I’ve been looking for a strainer, but prefer the idea of blending in the peels. However with strainer you don’t have to core or peel (as the recipe shows), but with blending you must have to core, and perhaps also make sure the pieces are small enough that the peel will blend up well? Thank you!
Natalia… I cored the apples and cut them up into large chunks, without peeling them. Since I cooked them down (gently) for quite a long time, the peels became soft and the chunks completely cooked down. Then I used the stick blender to blend all remaining chunks and the skins together to make a smooth applesauce. The skins aren’t even noticeable when you look at it. You can feel the tiny peels with your tongue but they are barely noticeable (to us)… let us know how it goes!