When I got home from a week at the beach, I looked in the refrigerator and saw the basket of apples. I’d bought them about a week before our trip, and for some reason we just hadn’t eaten as many apples as we usually do. So I had stuck the basket in the refrigerator right before we left so they wouldn’t deteriorate too badly while we were gone.
What to do with them? They weren’t bad, but they were beginning to get a tad soft and wrinkled. They were good for cooking but not good for eating raw.
Homemade Apple Butter
I decided to make apple butter out of them. There were about ten apples altogether — all of them Gala apples. I cored, peeled and cut them up and placed them in a large pot. They pretty much filled the pot. Then I poured an entire four pound package of sugar over them, stirred it well, and then covered the pot and let it sit for an hour or two. Amazing how much liquid was drawn from the apples. After a couple hours, I turned on the heat and started cooking them. I added lots of cinnamon and apple pie spice. Lots. RT had just bought some apple juice, and so I dumped probably about a cup of apple juice into the mixture – just for the flavor. There was already plenty of liquid from the apples.
I brought the mixture to a boil – stirring almost constantly – until the apples were well cooked. In order to get the right consistency, I put the hot mixture in the blender and blended it briefly. It took two batches in the blender to get it all done. Then I returned it all to the pot and cooked it for about two hours on a low simmer. I wanted it very thick. Meanwhile I prepared small jelly jars by boiling them.
Altogether I got 11 jars of apple butter out of it, and it is delicious. The consistency is more like jam than apple butter – and I like that! It’s got a little more texture than commercial apple butter. It’s delicious.
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