My daughter is so happy, she can take homemade applesauce to school tomorrow.
My friend took me out to her parents' farm to pick apples. We grabbed a couple of bags of apples for eating and baking.
I made a couple of apple crisps and put the nicest of the apples on the side porch to save for eating.
There were plenty of apples on the ground for sauce and all those came home with me. There were some very small ones and most were brown and a couple were a little wormy. No problems, I quartered them all and dropped them into a stockpot. Those worms all floated to the top of the boiling pot, d-e-a-d. I picked them out easily.
The brown spots of the apple crisp apples went into the stockpot of apple stuff. The peelings went in there too.
I added a couple of quarts of water and simmered the pot for an hour an a half, until the apples softened.
I drained the apple mush and put it through the food mill.
Once I had sauced all the apples, I measured the sauce back into a stockpot.
My recipe calls for 1/4 cup of sugar for each cup of sauce.
My sauce was so naturally sweet that I used a fraction of that, about one and a half cups of sugar for fourteen cups of sauce. I like a spiced applesauce, so I added two teaspoons of cinnamon, one teaspoon of cloves, and a half a teaspoon of allspice. I heated the sauce and tested it. It was perfect.
I spooned the hot sauce into pint jars and sealed them with 2-part lids and processed them in a water bath canner for 20 minutes.
It's delicious sauce, full of apple flavor, nothing like the stuff found at the grocery store. And it's made from cast off apples, a little sugar, and some spice.
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