Apple sauce

So what to do when you have a large amount of apples? I guess making apple sauce is one of the obvious answers. Since I've never made apple sauce before, Google was as always the answer to my prayers and I ended up using this recipe as a starting point for my own sauce.



I love how the recipe calls for "4 large cooking apples". What is large? What is cooking apples? So my own adaption of it was:

4 liters of apple chunks (peeled and cored)
300 grams sugar
18 cloves
Juice of 1 lemon
6-7 tbsp water
200 grams butter


Cutting and peeling apples is definitely not my favorite part, especially not when the apples are small and many, but after what felt like peeling a gazillion apples I had finally filled my big pot.

This is what 4 liters of peeled apples look like. 

And then I just threw in the sugar, cloves and water. And squeezed the lemon over it before I put it over medium heat on the stove.

Yep, here it is on the stove. Still looks pretty much like just 4 liters of peeled apples. 

I didn't really know what to expect when cooking the apples. The recipe didn't say much about how much time I should cook them, and then it said that I would have to mash when they had become soft. I discovered quite soon that the apples seemed to be mashing themselves while cooking, so I just left the pot simmering on the stove while occasionally stirring and observing that more and more of the apples disintegrated and became sauce.

Getting saucier and saucier by the minute.

When most of the apple chunks had become mashed, I started fishing out the cloves (this is the point where you are glad you counted the number of cloves you threw in, that way you know when you've found them all). I also took a fork and mashed some of the bigger chunks.

Now it really starts to look like apple sauce.

When the sauce was more or less chunk free (not perfectly so since I didn't run it through a food processor or blender) I added the butter. At this point I had turned the heat down to low, but the sauce was still cooking.

Yes, apple sauce is delicious, but not necessarily a diet product even when
you make it yourself. 

I was surprised at how the butter changed the sauce. I thought it already tasted good and had a nice, saucy consistency, but the butter made both the taste and the consistency so much smoother! If you feel that your apple sauce is too tart, I would recommend you to wait adding more sugar until after you have added the butter. The butter might give the sauce the right amount of sweetness.

5 boxes for us, one box for my nice neighbor who gave us the apples. 

My 4 liters of apples turned into to around 2 liters of apple sauce. We will have some of it with our dinner tonight (pork sirloin) and the rest I will freeze. I'm already thinking about making a second batch of it because it was so easy to make, and it turned out really great!