Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Homemade applesauce

Mart:

We find our Honey Crisp to be our best storage apples. We store them in a cool refrigerator and use them through March in place of tomatoes in our salads.

Logger,

I have a cool room in the basement. No heat runs about 52-55 degrees. I sorted out all the apples showing signs of damage, soft spots and rot two weeks ago. In just two weeks I had a bunch more going soft. That’s why I opted to turn them all into sauce. I thought they would keep better but knew if I didn’t sauce them I’d loose them.

I remember when I was little my mom used to make it. Hand a hand cranked thing that squished the cooked apples through a strainer trope thing.

Was the bomb. Especially with a pork chop!

Gravenstein apples make really good applesauce!

That Saucenator looks like something Wile E. Coyote would use to chase the Roadrunner with, complete with afterburner. Does it leave chunks in the Applesauce? That's what I remember most about my Grandmother's homemade Applesauce.

My grandmother made homemade applesauce from the fruit off of the tree in the yard. It was awesome. More like apple pie than the jarred stuff in the store. Might have had a bit of sugar added!

Yes that makes sense. We select the best and put them in our garage refrig which is rarely opened and is kept around 36 degrees. We do the same sort with our Fujis, Kings, Jonagolds, Yellow Delicious and Spartans. The bad ones are fed to the deer. Then we make applesauce with all apples contributing. Left overs are stored in our insulated shop. They are fed to the deer through out the winter and spring.

No cooking involved making that sauce?

Take the handle off that peel/core/slice machine and clamp a cordless drill motor onto the shaft. It makes the processing job a lot easier!

I canned over 30 quarts of sauce this year. I left the peelings on,Haralred apples! I was sparing on the brown sugar and a few batches I put in some excess garden produce, cukes,peppers,etc. and one batch I mixed in a bag of ground up cranberries! All good,imho!

We made applesauce using Stayman's this year. I made a 3 prong holder I mount in a cordless drill to spin the apples and use a peeler like used to skin carrots to peel apples. Takes about 10 seconds to peel one. We bought a cutter like this

and in one push the apples go in the pot. Doesn't take long to go through a bushel.

Wife makes a batch most years. Lodi apple tree in the yard.

Got pears? Make sauce from them just like apples. It's really good mixed 50-50 with apple sauce.

A black bear ate almost all of our apples this year and broke the tree all to hell. Got enough left for a half dozen pies and that's about it. GD

That looks great. Do you just hot bath the jars to seal them?

We cut the apples in quarters or eighths depending on size and cook until softened. Then process through the sauce maker. No peeling or coring. We take the stems out and trim out the blossom end. Mostly because my grandmother always claimed they would leave a bitter taste.

Hot applesauce into hot jars and water bath for 20 minutes.

Gotcha. Thanks, mart, and enjoy.

When I'm doing a bunch of them, I'll cook them and dump them in 3 gal buckets and put them in the cooler. They'll keep for a week below 40F. Then when I start straining and canning, I can do more jars at once. They don't have to be hot to strain them. Cooled ones work just fine.

If I have a batch in the canner, I fill the next batch of jars and set them in hot water until its turn comes in the canner. That prevents cracking from heating too fast.

That's cool, mart.

Are you staying in Idaho now or are you planning to go back north?

We're staying in Idaho. We sold our home in Alaska and bought a house in Craigmont. We wanted to be closer to family. We had 20 good years of an Alaska adventure but felt we needed to be closer to my Mom and Etta's family.