Applesauce

It has been pouring and in the 40s most of the week, and right now it seems hard to remember that we had a weekend of almost perfect fall loveliness only five days ago. I say almost, because we should have gone biking in the sunshine on Sunday afternoon instead of watching the Redskins lose AGAIN. I am still regretting that.

Otherwise, the weekend was full of pumpkin pasta, apple pie, getting out the fall decorations, and finally getting the new carpet installed in our basement. Oh, and making applesauce. A few friends and I went apple picking last weekend specifically for this purpose. I do make applesauce every year, and I've had a few people ask for the recipe this fall. So I thought I'd share here.

Applesauce is near and dear to my heart. The other day I pulled the last jar of 2008 sauce out of the freezer for breakfast, and when I broke into it, it was still a bit icy on top. Instantly I was back at the Farm, finally arriving after a long drive from Boise and sitting down to Grandma's homemade mac and cheese and applesauce just out of the freezer. Nothing is better than my grandma's applesauce, and when we were there last month we looked at all the apples in the orchard (pic above) and reminisced about it for at least fifteen minutes.

My applesauce can't compare with this delicious masterpiece, in large part because I don't have Gravenstein apples growing in my backyard. Or pretty much anywhere on the east coast. If you have them, please make some applesauce. It's just not fair if you don't. That being said, it still turns out pretty tasty.

(Oh, and in case you are worried, making your own applesauce does not make you Martha Stewart. Baking your daily bread from scratch, that makes you Martha Stewart. Making your own applesauce just makes you cool.)

Applesauce has very few ingredients, which are listed below:

1. Apples

See what I mean? I used mostly Staymon apples, which are large and rather tart. I cut the apples, skins, cores, seeds and all, into large chunks and piled them into my dutch oven (or any large pot) until it was full. The only thing to cut out is the bottom part of the core (the part that used to be the flower), because sometimes that can go through the food mill. Then I added about a cup of water and set it on a slow simmer.

After about 30 minutes, the apples looked like this:

They were utterly falling apart, and they smelled like everything good about fall and childhood. Mmm. If only I could capture the smell of cooking apples on this blog, you would be salivating.

Once the apples were cooked, I got out the proper equipment. The items you need for applesauce making are:

1. A food mill.

2. A ladle.

It's very complicated stuff. I set the food mill over a bowl, then ladled some of the cooked apple, skins, seeds, and all, into the mill and started churning away until shortly, actual applesauce started coming out of the holes. (This always reminds me of playing with the Play-Doh barbershop thing, where you crank and play-doh starts coming out of the holes and creating hair. You remember, right? Anyway, moving on.) The skin, seeds, etc. stayed inside the food mill, the sauce came out. Brilliant, no?

Once I worked the sauce through the mill, I kept adding a few more ladles at a time, repeating until either the apples were gone or my arm had no more strength. (I ran out of apples first. That's right, I know where the gym is.)

And that's it. Applesauce. Tasty, delicious, amazing. I freeze mine and it lasts for months (mostly because Jason doesn't like applesauce (gasp!) and I get to eat it all myself), if I make enough. A few additional tips:

1. Okay, so sometimes applesauce has more than one ingredient--I just like the pure stuff, and I like to add my own sweetener at will. But if you want to add some brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, etc. to the apples while they're cooking, that sounds really yummy too.

2. Please, please don't let your applesauce burn. It ruins pans. I completely destroyed one of Jason's pans making applesauce one time. This was before we were dating, and the fact that he still married me speaks volumes of his patience. Actually, I burned my applesauce this year too, we are both afraid my very expensive, very beloved le Creuset will never be quite the same. If you are going to, say, go and take a shower and forget that you have apples cooking (erm...), add another cup of water or more.

3. I love-with-hearts-around-it my food mill. When we got married, I actually purchased a Crate and Barrel food mill with a wedding gift card just to make applesauce. That first batch turned out chunky and with more than a few bits of peel in it. Even my mom couldn't really compliment it. So she found me an old-fashioned one at a second hand store--just like hers and my grandma's--which is a funky metal funnel shape and has a wooden pestle to press the food through the holes. It takes the arm-pain out of the process and cranks out lovely, smooth sauce. If your mom isn't as good at scouring second hand stores as my mom is (and, let's face it, she's probably not, because my mom could find actual buried treasure at Goodwill), just make sure you get a food mill with a fine screen.

The only other thing to watch with the food mill is that you don't fill it too full, at which time all that peel that you have been keeping inside may actually spill over the top and out into your applesauce. Very disappointing when that happens.

Okay! Go forth and make applesauce! And now, I, too, will know how to make applesauce when, next October, I forget both what type of apples I used the previous year AND how to do it (do I core the apples? How much water?), and then have to hope that my mom is not in Africa while I have apples coming out of my ears. Yay for all of us!