Apple Butter - Yum!

There is nothing quite as satisfying as taking fresh fruit and turning it into a yummy jam or jelly, marmalade, or in this case "butter", much coveted by my friends and family. In years past, I've made strawberry, sour cherry, gooseberry and plum marmalade, all of which have been immensely popular... Right, Amy? :)

This past weekend, at the farmer's market, Mr. Ott's green apples caught my eye. When I went to chat with him, he said that these apples were early, and very tart, so they are perfect for apple sauce or green apple pie. Feeling inspired, I purchased a half bushel (= 22-24 lbs) of apples to make into apple sauce or apple butter. The half bushel worth of apples actually filled the box, but these are the apples that I still have left after, oh, several (5) hours of cutting up and cooking apples. Guess what I'll be up to tomorrow evening! (yep, that's right, making more applesauce!)

So, I cooked up and puréed the apples in batches (about 3 or 4 times, see photo 2) before adding some sugar substitute, cinnamon and nutmeg to cook the mash down to a thicker apple butter. That actually simmered for more than two hours before I couldn't stand it any more -- and who knows, I think it was as close as it was going to get without using some other method of cooking it down, such as putting it in the oven for many hours.

In the end, I filled 6 3/4 pint jars with apple butter, and another 5 jars with tart, unsweetened apple sauce, which pretty much used all of the dozen jars I had prepared, so it seemed like a good place to break for the day, and then I will make the rest up into apple sauce tomorrow evening after work -- more apple butter will take MUCH too long...

And in my recipe search, I discovered a great set of recipes, one for peach butter, and one for peach jelly (from the skins and pits discarded in the other recipe!), and I think I walked past some fresh peaches at the market, so we'll see what is there this coming Saturday!