Posted: 9/5/2009 11:56:55 PM EDT
Forgive me for not posting more.....it's been a long day.
We make applesauce once a year and try to make enough for the year. Starting from this (and this is half the apples): 
We end up with this (plus 5 gallons of apple butter base): 
Canning in large quantities is surprisingly tiring.....I'll post more tomorrow. 
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I WISH these apples came for our own trees, but we only have 4 trees which don't give anywhere the volume we need.
These came from an orchard near us that runs a U-pick section. (As a side note, this orchard is giving us a 55 gallon barrel a week of unsaleable fruit that we're feeding to the pigs.  )
These particular apples are Honeycrisp and Gala which are both sweet apples that are good for sauce. The sauce process is simple but tedious. Gotta start by washing the apples.....Mrs. Feral washes them in a vinegar solution as that removes pesticides more thoroughly than just water. Then you slice 'em up. We drop the slices briefly into a lemon juice solution to minimize browning. They then get strained before going in the cookpot. 
Once they're cut up, they go into big pots on the outside burners so they can cook down. 
You want them mushy so you can sauce them. I prime the pots with a little apple juice before starting to cook them down. Doing so minimizes scorching. (It's hard to stir 8 gallons of apple slices until they cook down a bit. You need a wooden spoon or a a paddle as metal spoons will bend.) 
Once the apples have cooked down you can sauce them using whatever technique is available to you. We're lucky enough to have a strainer that goes on the meat grinder. This machine makes the "saucing" part easy and relatively quick. Having done it with a manual food strainer and a KitchenAId mixer in the past, this is real luxury! You can do it manually with a chinois, Foley mill or Victorio strainer but it will be very time consuming. If you're gonna do it that way, I'd strongly suggest doing a trial run before jumping into a big batch of apples. 
When you have the hot apples processed into sauce, it goes back onto the burner to be brought to a boil. This is the point where you're basically tied to pot stirring constantly. Applesauce will scorch quickly and you really have to prevent that from happening. At the very least scorching makes your pot hard to clean and if you have a lot of it you'll impart an unpleasant flavor to the sauce. 
Once brought back to the boil, the sauce can be put in your hot jars and processed in the water bath. You process them 20 minutes. 
We acidify the sauce with lemon juice after grinding the sauce and boiling it. We use 400 mL lemon juice to acidify the sauce produced by cooking down 80 pounds of apples. This is comparable to the Ball book specifications. As a point of reference, these 10-gallon pots comfortably hold 40 pounds of raw sliced apples. After cooking them down and saucing them, those 80 pounds of apples will be a bit shy of 8 gallons of sauce and will fill ~30 quart jars. We don't add spices or sugar to our sauce though you can if you want. Starting from raw, unwashed apples and finishing up with everything canned and ~5 gallons of apple butter (more on that later) for cooking overnight, took 4 adults about 12 hours. I could shave time off that if I had a few more burners but not a huge amount of time. It's a lot of time, but then again it's the year's supply of applesauce.
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once again an impressive Feral Operation..excellent post,wish i had the patience and bandwith to start posting some pix, takes too damn long and I am old and grumpy...and cant be bothered..
I was curious about the apple season this year as you had such an ALGORE summer in the north east, here as well but not as bad as new england.. my brothers tomatoes and apple trees did little or nothing this season, do you make an apple butter reduction as well, or just do the apple sauce? I am planting a few apples this year as well as some peach trees and nuts, walnut/pecans, this year I only got in 3 pears and a grape start up.. so hope fully next year SOME small amount of fruit.. |
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Quoted:
do you make an apple butter reduction as well, or just do the apple sauce? Hey Chef, how are ya?
Yes, we reserved about 5 gallons for apple butter. It's still cooking as I type. 
Have it cooking in the slow roaster but it's going slow.....the other family that is canning these apples with us is doing their portion at their house. We'll get together and can it up later today, hopefully. The basic recipe, for those who are interested is: 120 cups applesauce 45 cups sugar 7 1/2 cups cider vinegar 7 1/2 tablespoons ground cloves 10 tablespoons cinnamon 2 1/2 tablespoons allspice Cook it down however you can––oven at 325 for 3-8 hours, crockpots for as long as it takes, roaster, vat over an open flame. Can in pints or half-pints with 1/4 inch headspace, 10 minutes in the water bath. Makes ~45 pints. Gotta run.......busy day again. 
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Looks good. I just did about a dozen or so quarts myself last week. i use one of those peeler/slicer/corer tools. then i put them the sliced/peeled/cored apples in a big slow roaster with a bit of water, and cook. i usually prefer my applesauce with chunks of apples, but the wife wants it more smooth. so this last time i used one of those handheld blender things and pureed the cooked apples. then add a bit of sugar and im done. process 20 minutes.
i am jealous of your volume/quantity production. i wish i had so many hands and time at once to do it. i try to just do a batch at a time by myself. enough apples to fill a canners worth of jars at a time, then clean up till later. on a side note, i also made a couple batches of apple jelly as i was doing the sauce. i used the cores and less than desirable apples (after cutting off the blemishes) as my base, and cooked, strained the juice, added sugar and sure-jell, and jarred. sealed with gulf wax. i liked this process as it doesnt add a lot of time to my applesauce making, and seems to better utilyze the entire apple. looks good Feral! |
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I'm clicking on this in secret. Mrs. Bronz made apple sauce yesterday from one of our trees. Damn it was bad. Sour, texture was wrong. Just not good. The boys and I just ate it anyway. Good for you guys for eating it with a smile. Applesauce that doesn't turn out well is a heartbreaker. It's such a lot of work that when it doesn't come out well, it'll make you cry. 
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Finished up with the apple butter today. Cooked it way down and canned it up in a few hours today. After spicing up 8 gallons of sauce, our yield was 20 pints and 41 half pints of finished apple butter.
So 7 1/2 bushels of apples got us the apple butter plus 82 quarts of applesauce. I'm thoroughly sick of apples now and trying to summon the energy to move on to grapes.
Last pics: 
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Quoted:
marathon canning will tire a person out quickly and sicken them of cannnig anything. Last week I turned 6gallons of tomato puree(2 wheelbarrows worth) into spaghetti sauce. 31 quarts in a 10 hour canning session. Up until a couple years ago I was always underestimating the amount of time it would take to do any given bit of canning. I can now predict almost exactly how long any canning task will take. I just imagine how long it should take, then add 50% to that figure. Works like a charm.
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| Feral, your homestead is a model of historic preservation and efficiency, I have enjoyed reading your posts over the last few years from the tomatoes and apple canning, to the wood splitting and drying, the garden and land. Thank you for everything you pass on to us, I for one enjoy it and wish I was exposed to it at a age I could remember, my grandmother who passed when I was still very young canned everything she and my grandfather (who passed a year before her) could. I remember canned cherries and homemade cookies that look like the shortbread keebler cookies with a solid chocolate bottom and chocolate stripes across the top. |
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Feral, your homestead is a model of historic preservation and efficiency, I have enjoyed reading your posts over the last few years from the tomatoes and apple canning, to the wood splitting and drying, the garden and land. Thank you for everything you pass on to us, I for one enjoy it and wish I was exposed to it at a age I could remember, my grandmother who passed when I was still very young canned everything she and my grandfather (who passed a year before her) could. I remember canned cherries and homemade cookies that look like the shortbread keebler cookies with a solid chocolate bottom and chocolate stripes across the top. That's about the best compliment we've gotten in a long time. Thank you. 
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How are you turning your apples into sauce? Food mill, strainer, mashing? What happened to the apple butter recipe you mentioned? There is another way of doing it if your not doing a lot of apples and you have the time just peal the apples chop up like you would potatoes that your going to mash them throw in a crock pot add enough water or apple juice not to cover but so you can see the liquid. Add sugar and what ever else you want. It takes about 8+ hours to make after about 3 hours you will see the apples getting soft you can mash them in the crock pot and keep cooking. Word of warning apple sauce is very very hot and says hot and will burn you good and fast. I like to use sweet apples like honey crisp when I make mine why get sour apples and add a lot of sugar to it to make it sweet? If you like it sweet just use sweet apples no need to add as much sugar. This advice also goes to the sour apple sauce poster must say it was good on you and the kids to just grin and eat it. |
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80 lbs of apples in the back of the truck. Applesauce tomorrow with apple butter to follow. All on Ferals' recipe. Couple of questions. I plan on softening the apples on a turkey fryer in an aluminum pot. Will that cause a problem? If you have to stop after processing the apples into pulp/sauce, can you refrigerate without it browning like apples will do if left out?
AAR to follow. |
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Quoted:
80 lbs of apples in the back of the truck. Applesauce tomorrow with apple butter to follow. All on Ferals' recipe. Couple of questions. I plan on softening the apples on a turkey fryer in an aluminum pot. Will that cause a problem? If you have to stop after processing the apples into pulp/sauce, can you refrigerate without it browning like apples will do if left out? AAR to follow. You're gonna have your work cut out for ya, friend.
I'll try to post something helpful in a bit. Right now I have to get Mrs. Feral set up to load our grape jelly into jars. |
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A turkey fryer pot (TF pot) will be slow in cooking apples down no matter what you do. The geometry of the TF pot is good for frying turkeys in the least amount of oil possible, but not so good for simmering things that want to scorch. Scorching will be your worst enemy here. (See below for some thoughts on scorching.)
You'll have to be patient here as the tendency will be to fill that pot to the brim with fresh apples. If you do that, it'll be impossible to stir effectively. Limit yourself to about a half pot of fresh apples and have a good stout stirring stick on hand. (Preferably two––can't tell you how many wooden spoons I've snapped stirring apples. ) Your cutters will quickly outpace your ability to cook the apples down. You'll have to keep track of that as it's inconvenient to find that you can cook down ten pounds of apples an hour but your cutters have cut up 50 pounds waiting on you.
Don't forget to prime the pot when you put fresh apples in to cook. I like to use apple juice, but water will work. In a TF pot, a half inch of liquid on the bottom will be adequate. You'll have a long day in front of you. I don't think there is any penalty to getting your apples cooked down and sauced then holding them in the refrigerator overnight. I would acidify them with the lemon juice before storing them. Probably shouldn't keep them in an aluminum pot while you hold them....acid and aluminum can create off flavors over time, IIRC. You'll likely get some oxidation, but it won't affect the sauce's taste. HTH, and good luck tomorrow.
Scorching:Did I mention that you really want to avoid scorching? Stir, stir, stir. Keep your heat pretty low. If you get scorching on a pot, take the time to clean it out thoroughly before the next batch. That's a PITA, but it's necessary. As you stir your apples you want to run your spoon or paddle (paddle is much better, big rubber spatula is probably better than wooden spoon) over the bottom of the pot. When you start out, the bottom of the pot will feel smooth. If the bottom starts feeling rough or lumpy, you've got scorching. At this point, cut your heat a bit and keep stirring. You don't want to stir the scorched bits up into the sauce as that can impart off flavors and actually ruin a batch. BTDT. Instead you want to just get the apples cooked, get 'em out and clean the pot. Stir OVER the scorching. |
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You started with 7.5 bushels. I missed that. I have 2 bushels. Thinking of going back to get more tommorow. Just asking for trouble, aren't I? Noooooo.....don't do it!
Do those 2 bushels this weekend, then go back for more next weekend after you perfect your technique.
Unless you're a masochist. 
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My brother and I tried our hands at canning and making apple butter for the first time last Fall. I couldn't have asked for it to turn out better. While it is quite time consuming trying to boil everything down, it was definitely worth it! Thank you for the thread, Feral. Seeing this thread makes me wish it were Fall right now.
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