It’s that time of year. The apple orchards are open and ready for picking. With 50+ apples in our kitchen, I used about 10 in an attempt to make some apple butter.
I find apples to be sweet already so I decided against adding any extra sugar. The cinnamon and ginger add a little sweetness, and if you use a sweeter red apple instead of a tart variety, you’ll probably find the resulting butter plenty sweet.
Ingredients to make your own:
Apples! 10-12 medium to large apples.
1 Tbps. apple cider vinegar.
1 cup apple juice or cider.
2 Cinnamon sticks and 1 tsp powder.
1 tsp Clove powder.
1 tsp powdered Ginger (or fresh ginger).
Juice from 1 small lemon.
Easy directions:
Remove the core from your apples and cut the apples into large chunks. No need to peel them. You can feed the cores to your chickens or add them to your vermicompost bin.
Put all the chunks into a large crockpot.
Add all the other ingredients.
Turn the crockpot on high for 4 hrs.
After 4 hours, the apples should be nice and soft. Using a spoon, I easily made chunky apple sauce by just mushing the apples in the crockpot. Then with an immersion blender I smoothed it all out to a nice creamy consistency and put it in 2.5 mason jars (it might’ve been 3 jars if I hadn’t eaten some in the making). This apple butter ends up being a little thinner because adding sugar thickens things up, but if you want to make yours a little thicker consistency, leave the crockpot top cracked a little bit during the last hour to allow some water to escape.
Slather some apple butter on anything that suits your fancy. Get it while the getting’s good, as it won’t be around long.
