Last week I peeled and cut over 100 apples and stewed them into 5 batches of apple butter. YUM. I wasn’t planning on making this post quite so long, but it took a long time to make all this apple butter, so I guess why it turned out so long after all.
Isn’t it pretty? Before this apple butter undertaking, I had never made apple butter before. This was also my first attempt at canning anything all by myself. Before we moved to Washington, I didn’t even know that canning meant sealing food in jars. Why don’t people just call it jarring or something? Or why don’t we just use cans instead of jars? Canning just doesn’t seem like an accurate word. Oh well.
Knowing someone who has an orchard is great—pick-your-own free fruit! But knowing someone who knows someone with an orchard is even better—free fruit delivered to your doorstep! Jeff’s padre, Dan, brought us TWO of these giant boxes heaped with gala apples. We don’t eat much applesauce around here, so I was wondering what to do with all those Malus domesticas crowding our crowded kitchen.
[yes, I Wikipedia-ed the scientific classification of apple. hey, I like a unique synonym as much as the next logophile…I’ll let you look that one up yourself]
Ok, I’m going to go all cooking-blog on you—when the mood strikes, I go with it. For the record, I have no special, time-and-labor-saving canning equipment. No apple-corer, no cool crank-y apple peeler, no applesauce grinder, no special water bath steamer—nada—not even any ninja-fast peeling skills. I’m actually quite a slow peeler, so this was a rather lengthy process. It took more than an hour to peel, core, and cut one batch-worth of apples (about 24 apples). It took much longer than that when Jay was helping and Rose was exploring.
Where were my children during all that? Hanging around nearby. Once or twice Aunt Steph came to Jay’s rescue so he didn’t go toooooo crazy.
Choppety chop chop. By the third or fourth batch of apple-prep, I was getting so bored up there, peeling and chopping away! So I got out our little laptop and turned on some Netflix to pass the time. It was very helpful. I researched apple butter recipes and narrowed it down to 5 options. Then I took what I liked from each recipe, added a little Shaina-flare, and wrote my very own superrrrrecipe. I was surprised and pleased that it actually worked. Recipe-rewriting is a tricky, touchy business.
Meanwhile, Rose methodically dismantled my counter top fruit basket. Luckily there was only one black banana left in it.
Finally, all the apples were loaded into the crock pot. With difficulty, I mixed in some balsamic vinegar, a cup of brown sugar, some cinnamon, and some ground cloves. That’s all it took to concoct the yummiest apple butter of all time! And my house smelled like heaven for a week straight. Slow-cooked apples, cinnamon, and cloves are the greatest potpourri ever.
While Rose explores the basket a little more, I have to mention how HARD it was for me to find a bottle of ground cloves around here. For some reason I didn’t already have them in my spice collection, so I put it on my Winco list and went merrily to the best grocery store ever. Apparently everyone else had ground cloves on their lists too. THEY WERE OUT of ground cloves at Winco! I even reached my hand up to the armpit back into the spice shelf to feel around for a stray bottle, but to no avail. I came home empty-handed.
Next I tried El Mercado de Grandview (the big one on Euclid Rd, not to be confused with the 10 other Mercados de Grandview here. The lack of creativity in store—or should I say tienda—names here really bugs me for some reason. But then again, you know how much I like a well-chosen, well-placed word). The only actual spice El Mercado had was cinnamon! Pathetic. SO I went to Expensive-ville, more commonly known as Safeway. Don’t get me wrong, I really do like Safeway. But their spices are expensive. Well, they had it. I got it. The end.
I won’t bore you with the story of my hunt for jars and lids. Suffice it to say that I finally found those too.
Ahhh, look at those apples simmer! I wish there was a way to attach a smell to a picture.
The tower of terror. We have about 2 square feet of counter space in our kitchen, so I made a tower of all our appliances to save space. The crock pot normally lives in a cupboard, but for the apple buttering, it was atop the toaster-oven microwave tower.
My very first batch of apple butter was delicious! I just stewed those apples down till they fell apart at the touch of a spoon, and then I stuck my electric beater into the hot bubbliness and whipped them into apple butter. I just put that first trial batch in the fridge in old jam jars. But it was so good that I made 4 more batches and actually sealed them in real canning jars.
Because I already wrote the recipe once, I don’t want to type it too. I’m not in that much of a cooky-bloggy mood.
Can you believe that all I had to do was just whip those cooked apples with an egg beater? No blender necessary. Although I do want one of those sweet immersion blenders. My kitchen in the clouds has one. (aka amazon.com wishlist)
The Borg formation of apple butter jars. Are you wondering how I got them to seal without a steamer? If you’re an experienced canner, you probably won’t find this surprising. But I had no idea that you could seal jars without boiling them in a special water bath steamer. One of my favorite cooking blogs had a recipe for some jelly a few weeks ago, and there was no steamer mentioned!
So I followed those steamerless instructions: keep the jars and lids in simmering water till you’re ready to fill them with boiling apple butter. Everything has to be boiling hot. Once each jar is full, you turn it over and let it sit on its lid for 10 minutes. Then flip it over, and the jar seals shut with a little POP. Just like magic! One batch didn’t work because I tried using the dishwasher’s plate warmer to keep the jars hot instead of boiling them in water.The dishwasher didn’t get them hot enough, so they didn’t seal. So I just laid a few jars at a time in my biggest pot and boiled them for like 6 minutes. That did the trick. Now I have 12 pints and 12 half-pints of aromatic apple butter tucked away on the top of the fridge. Even though I’ve never seen it on lists of food storage basics, I’m glad we now have a year’s supply of apple butter.
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Special thanks to Dr. Brennan, Agent Booth, and Netflix for providing the entertainment. I couldn’t have stayed sane while peeling all those apples without you.
