Making Apple Butter the Old-Time Way

Apple butter, start to finish:

Day One: this part took about 6 hours.

This weekend was the time to make apple butter. The weather was cool and crisp and the threat of rain held off for us. The apples get a bath before we start. Last time we cooked apple butter, it was 20 degrees and snowing, with a stiff cold wind. That was an experience! This was a much better weekend for it, even if a little chilly.

We all cut apples--and cut apples--and cut apples. No need to peel or core--the Squeezo does that. We had mostly red apples from Derek's tree, and some yellow ones from my favorite tree. Red apples are best because they provide the color I want in my apple butter. I don't know the variety of these apples--mine is a seedling tree that produces wonderful sweet apples, and Derek's tree has spicy, crisp red apples (I think they're a Winesap, but don't know for sure.)

The kettles start filling up, ready for cooking.



The ol' granny herself, in the Holstein apron a friend sent me. I do not collect Holstein stuff, but I like this apron because it provides pretty good coverage. We use the turkey fryer burner for cooking---it's sturdy and we can do the cooking outside and keep the mess out of the house. We've never used this thing to fry a turkey, but we sure use it for lots of other things!


The apples are cooked and ready for processing into sauce.




Tools of the trade: two Squeezos to separate the apple sauce from seeds, cores and skins, a five-gallon and a 10-gallon crock, ladles, plungers, bowls to catch the waste, a fire in the firepit to keep us warm--and coffee!

The other end of the Squeezo, and one crock is full.

Day Two: Again, another 6 hours of cooking, then a couple hours to jar up the finished product and clean everything up.

All of us took turns stirring during the day. Larry and Derek were the fire masters. The fire must be hot enough to keep the sauce bubbling, but not so hot it plops high in the air! When the wind picked up, we added two "blow Georges" to the sides--I'd never heard this term before, but Larry said that's what they called it when they used tin or something to shelter a fire from the wind. We used two small pieces of galvanized roofing tin and it did a good job.

Derek adds sugar. It takes a lot! My kettle holds 15 gallons, and to that amount of apple cause, we added between 25-30 pounds of sugar (or about a pound per 8 cups of sauce). If you compare that to making jam or jelly, it's pretty close to the same ratio.



Can you see the swirl of darker color following the paddle? The paddle, you'll notice, has holes in it to allow the sauce to flow through as it is stirred. One thing you don't see is pennies. There are about 5 pennies on the bottom of the kettle that move around as the sauce is stirred to keep it from sticking to the copper-and-brass kettle. The metal is very, very thin, so it's important to stir constantly and be sure the sauce doesn't stick--if it does, the whole kettle of sauce is ruined.

After the sugar is added, the apple butter really begins to darken. (See the blow Georges?)

Almost ready! The sauce cooked down about 4 more inches after this photo was taken. I test by the "slump" method, as Derek calls it. I dip out some sauce onto a place, and see if it piles up nicely. Then let it cool a bit and flip the plate. If the apple butter stays on the plate, it's done.



Cinnamon oil is powerful stuff! I used just three tiny bottles in the kettle to give it a good cinnamon-y flavor. Some people use red cinnamon candies, but I do not like that method. I prefer a more natural approach, and my apple butter has a deep color without adding anything to it for coloring. The right apples, the right amount of sugar, and long cooking produce the deep brownish-red color that says good apple butter to me.

Finished! How much did it make? I didn't count this year; usually we end up with 30 quarts, but because we started with such a full kettle of sauce, I think we had closer to 35 or 36 quarts. We put most of it into pint and half-pint jars but when I ran out of those we used quarts.

We also canned 22 quarts of applesauce while we were at it--and yes, you can see one jar that broke when I put it in the canner. Now that's a mess to clean up.

Ah! The finished, spicy brown, delicious product, best eaten on homemade biscuits as Jared is demonstrating. Worth every minute of work.