Not-So-Secret Sauce

A week and a half ago I got a text from a friend in our ward saying they had too many apples on their tree and offered to let us come pick what we wanted. She warned me that they weren't good for eating, but made great applesauce. I took the four younger kids and some plastic bags and we visited while we picked apples. We left many apples that we couldn't reach and somehow still came home with 42 pounds of apples!

I found a no sugar, instant pot applesauce recipe and wanted to get started right away, but I didn't have all the needed equipment. Originally I was going to use our apple peeler/corer, then cook the sliced apples and mash them in the blender. But I wanted to use as much of the apple as possible, so instead I ordered an applesauce maker from Amazon and then waited for it to be delivered.

A few days after gathering the apples, we finally started the applesauce making. The last time I made applesauce was before Instant Pots were a thing. This was soooooo much nicer and more efficient than cooking the apples on the stove. 

Several of the kids thought these were potatoes.

Even with the Instant Pots speeding the process along, this took several hours. I was down to the point of cooking the last batch when I made myself call it a night, well after midnight. This very cool tool did make the process easier. 

The next morning we cooked and mashed the last of the apples. I had a few helpers. 

Those 42 pounds of apples made 12 quarts of applesauce. I had discovered that my trusty canner that had been taking up space in the basement for many years could not be used on our glass cooktop. So instead of canning the applesauce right away, I stored it all in the fridge in the garage and waited for a new, flatbottomed canner to be delivered by amazon.

I was thrilled when it arrived, it was a thing of beauty. For real life. And then we looked up the manufacturer information on our stove top and found out that the pot was so big it could possibly crack the stove. Ugh. We returned it to Amazon.

Thankfully, we have a restaurant supply store nearby. They don't sell canners, but they do sell giant stock pots and steamer racks, and that's how I cobbled together a canner that would fit on my stove. I have ordered a proper canning rack to fit this pot, but it won't be here for a few weeks and I needed to get that applesauce canned while it was still edible.

Yesterday was the day! The hardest thing about the canning was that I had to warm the applesauce back up and I could only heat 4 quarts at a time in my second biggest pot on my second biggest burner. It took most of the day, but we ended up with 8 quarts and 8 pints. It's delicious, those apples really do make excellent applesauce.