Homemade applesauce is always a treat. With apple Season just around the corner you can smell it in the air. I love drying, juicing and saucing them. My kids love to head to grandma’s house and pick bushels of them to eat. So this year while canning with my buddies we decide to make Maple Brown Sugar Blender Applesauce.
This apple sauce is so easy to make. Here is how we made it.
Homemade Applesauce
Apples (any variety will work, but thinner skinned and larger ones are best—faster prep and a lower skin ratio)
Bottled lemon juice (Ball Bible says 1 T/quart for safe acidity levels)
Maple extract
Vanilla extract
Cinnamon
Brown Sugar
Core apples and cut in quarters—leave the skins on (this is what I use: Pampered Chef Apple Wedge Cutter). Start with just handful of apples in your blender and lemon juice to get things going–once you’ve got a liquefied puree, you should be able to add more apples no problem. If needed, keep some apple juice on hand to add to the blender to get things pureeing. (Note, you need a powerful blender like a Blendtec—your average blender won’t be able to obliterate the peels and churn out a perfectly smooth sauce…and your motor will likely burn out from the stress). Dump each pureed blenderful of sauce into a big stock pot to get it steamy hot (you don’t necessarily need to cook it—you just don’t want a temperature shock when you put your jars into the boiling water bath).
When you’ve got plenty of applesauce in your stock pot, season to taste and mix well (I personally aim for about 1/2 t vanilla, 1 t maple extract, 1 t cinnamon and ½ c brown sugar per quart of applesauce). Keep in mind that how much brown sugar you add is highly contingent on the sugar content of the apples you’re using and your taste buds. Put in hot quart jars with 1” head space and process 25 minutes (this is for 5000 ft altitude, you can lower processing time by about 1 minute for every 1000 ft closer to sea-level).
You can even make the blender style sauce without the flavor. Make it all natural and turn it into yummy homemade fruit roll ups Check out my post here.
Check out the entire post on my blog www.freetimefrolics.com
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We’ve been having so much fun picking with grandma as well although her apples are only just ready so we’ve been picking mostly crab apples, damsons & blackberries so far.
Do come over and share the post at this week’s Empty Your Archive – we’re linking up sauces of all kinds.
Plus you can link up your great old posts on all sorts of other fun food, craft, decor & parenting posts – would love to see you there, Alice @ Mums Make Lists x