Domestic Revolution: Apple Butter Business

2/4/12

Apple Butter Business

Two weeks ago I started a campaign on craigslist for canning supplies. Preserving is my cause du-jour at the moment. I am getting super excited about things like canning, fermenting, and dehydrating. Oh the possibilities!

During my quest for free canning supplies, I was contacted by a person that worked for an older gentleman with a plethora of canning business cluttering up his shop since his wife passed on. Boss and I immediately planned a trip out to the nether reaches of the county to pick up our free swag and start the canning fun times.

When we got there, we found the COOLEST gentleman either of us have had the pleasure of meeting since our own grandpa's (who are both extremely awesome mind you). Farmer Jim had not only canning supplies, but an industrial rock tumbler, gads of shiny rocks from all over the US, a stuffed owl and so many amazing handy craft projects I think etsy would blow up if it allowed him to post to their site.

Farmer Jim loaded us up with jars and a canning set up and also sent us home with a HUGE bucket of apples to start off our adventure in canning. Boss now has his old gentleman mentor, and I now have my canning supplies...all in all, a prosperous trip.

[caption id="attachment_943" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="above: a veritable shit ton of apples"]

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When I got home, I couldn't decide what it was I wanted to DO with these nifty canning supplies and all of these apples. We are big fans of apple muffins in this house, but it seemed a little silly to make 600 of them just to use up my apples. After a quick offering to the Oracle, it was decided that apple butter would be the coolest thing we could make with the ingredients we already had on hand.

The process begins with a veritable shit ton of apples. We used two bags from the grocery store as well as 10 of Farmer Jim's far superior apples. We filled the crock pot with tiny chunks of apples and thought smugly...this shall make thousands upon thousands of gallons of delicious apple butter! MWHAHAHAHAHA! It of course made...2 pints of delicious apple butter. According to the interwebs, if youw ant to make gallons of the stuff, you will need to keep adding apples as it cooks down and you will need far more than like 30 apples. SO the recipe I am posting here is for a small yield batch that you can do in a weekend with your crock pot. The apple butter purists will do it in gigantic pots over fires and such. I am no apple butter purist.

Let us begin.

Ingredients:

A bunch of of apples (30 or so) -cored and chopped. I leave the skins on because they cook down and it doesn't make any difference to me. Plus...the lazy...

[caption id="attachment_944" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="like-a-so"]

The original recipe calls for 4 cups of sugar...which is a god awful amount of sugar. So We changed it to 1/2 cup of honey and it is perfectly sweet and spicy.

mix up 2 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp ground cloves, and 1/4 tsp salt and sprinkle over the apples

Cook on high for 1 hour, then reduce heat to low and cook for 9 hours ish until warm and soft. I take my immersion blender to it at this point and smoosh it around until its liquidy and thick. Let it cook for another hour with the lid off.

[/caption] When you can take a spoon-ful and put it on a plate, and there is no halo of fluid around it, it is apparently done. [caption id="attachment_948" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="a poor example of this is illustrated here"][/caption] Spoon that delicious mess into your jars nice and hot. We don't have a canning funnel so we used a regular one, which worked but it was a little slower going. [caption id="attachment_949" align="aligncenter" width="225" caption="nom a nom a nom"][/caption] Use your favorite water bath canning method to preserve your new awesome apple butter. Because we ended up with only 2 jars, we didn't bother to can it, though the heat from the butter sealed one of my mason jars anyway so that was an added bonus! Be sure to leave about a 1/4 inch of room at the top to allow for expansion. We spread it on toasts, we eat it on our museli in the morning, we bathe in it...wait...too may secrets revealed...ENJOY!

Domestic Revolution