The ugly truth about applesauce

by trydberg

Making applesauce signals the official end of my summer canning. It’s great to finally sort out lids and jars and equipment and put everything away in the basement! It’s satisfying to look into the pantry and see a bunch of beautiful jars.

But here’s the ugly truth…no matter how hard I try, how careful I am, how prepared and organized my equipment is…I can guarantee that my kitchen will be a total mess when I’m done! It’s not like those blogs where the kitchens are always so spotless, no matter what they’re making!

To make applesauce, I started out with “seconds” from our local apple grower, Fireside Orchard.

Washed the apples. Set up my equipment. I use my Kitchen Aid mixer with the juicer attachment as shown below. It has a strainer and a spout that separates the sauce into one pan, and sends the peels and seeds to another pan. Got my jars washed and heated in oven. Canner out. Everything is sterilized.

I fill our big soup pot with quartered apples. I don’t remove the stems or seeds. I add about a cup of water to the bottom of the pot so that the apples don’t stick. ( I forgot to do this once and it took 45 minutes to scrape the scorched apples from the bottom of the pot.) I turned the heat to medium-low. It takes a couple of hours to cook the apples down.

The apples need to be mushy before running them through the sauce attachment. The picture on the left shows them getting a good start—the picture on the right shows them ready to process. Steam is fogging up the camera lens.

Now the apples are run through the sauce attachment.

Cooked apples are placed in the top trough. You use a wooden stomper to press it into the corkscrew and sieve. The sauce comes out in the big bowl; the seeds, skins and stems end up in the little bowl and are fed to the chickens as a special treat.

I add sugar and cinnamon to my applesauce, except for those jars I’m making for my grandson, Eli.

The sweetest baby in the world and the most loving mama on this planet.
He’s not ready for applesauce yet, but will be in a few months!

Put lemon juice in jars, fill jars with hot applesauce and get them in the canner. Process them.

And repeat this process as your kitchen gets messier and messier. By the end of Day 2, you have applesauce on your tools, in jars, on the floor…everywhere. I needed to use a dough scraper to get the applesauce off the counter! Everything is sticky and gooey—not at all like the glamorous, clean kitchens shown in other blog posts!

Helpful hint: if you don’t have a dough scraper, an old credit card is GREAT for scraping stuck-on goop from your counter and pans. I keep a couple of expired credit cards in the kitchen junk drawer for emergencies.

The good news is that I ended up with 20+ quarts and 5 pints of applesauce. And since the kitchen was already a disaster, I quickly made batch of salsa. Might as well…

So, this is my true confession…that no matter what the photos look like, I am the messiest cook there ever was. I often wonder if the “other” people who write cooking blogs clean their kitchen before each photo is taken so that they can create the illusion that they are oh, so tidy. Know that if your kitchen is a disaster when you are canning, know that you are in good company!

I am so amazed at this summer’s incredible garden. I am in awe of the grandmothers before us who figured out this crazy and magical process of canning. As I ceremoniously put my canning equipment away, I hope for another season of gardening and the health and energy required to preserve food for the long winter!

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