Applesauce

This is something I haven't made in a few years.  Timewise it's not that much of a job, but it is an involved process.  First the apples have to be cut up, then heated, then processed, then seasoned (sugar and/or cinnamon), and finally canned.  All of this requires coordination of stove space, pots (including the washing thereof), and processes to keep everything moving smoothly with minimal bottlenecks.

Apples need to be pulped, and for that, they need to be heated.  The other thing I use the food mill for is peach butter, and when pulping those, it can be done raw.  Raw peaches are tough but doable.  Raw apples are not.  So they need to be cut up and thrown into a pot to cook a bit.  The first time I made applesauce, I tossed the whole thing into the pot, just quartering it.  Now I use an apple slicer and pitch the core.

There is some apple pulp that gets lost when sacrificing the core, but I do it this way for a few reasons:  First, getting the seeds out is a help.  They just contribute to the mess in the mill.  Second, the area around the stem is likely to be dirty and have pesticide and herbicide residue (I wash them off to some degree, but washing thoroughly in the stem area would be troublesome).  Third, the cores often have problems--apples often begin to decay in the core area before the rest of the apple suffers any loss in quality.  Using an apple slicer also makes the process pretty quick, and cuts the apples into relatively narrow pieces for heating.

As a side note, the slicer above didn't last very long.  I got it to handle big apples, which it worked well for--for the first 100 or so apples.  Then it broke, forcing me back to my other slicer that is smaller and does eight slices.

Once sliced, they go into the pots for heating.  There's no need to dunk them in a vitamin C or citric acid solution to prevent browning as I do when preparing apples for dehydrating.

The heating phase is the most difficult logistically.  The apples will break down rapidly as they heat, but initially, for 8 quarts of sauce, about 25-30 quarts of heating capacity are needed.  I put a little water in the bottom of the pots to limit sticking (the apples themselves will contribute more as they cook down), and turn the pile over frequently to heat the slices on top.

It can take a while to heat them, maybe 20 minutes, and at that point there will probably still be a few slices on top that are hard.  Trying to mill them is an exercise in frustration.  I just toss back any that are hard and let them continue to heat.

Soft slices pulp almost immediately.  The peels don't break down and have to be removed frequently while milling.

Milling enough apples for eight quarts of sauce takes a while.  Probably a half bushel, roughly 20 pounds raw or even a bit more, are needed for that amount of sauce, and much of that ends up being cores and peels, i.e., waste (unless you have rabbits, chickens, or other animals that might like the tailings).  All of the fiber is apparently in the skin; applesauce itself has almost no fiber.

 

 At any rate, I just hook the mill on top of a large pot and periodically transfer the sauce back to one of the pots--once I have one emptied of cooked slices--for seasoning.  I don't add sugar.  This batch of sauce was about 2/3 Stayman and 1/3 Goldrush, with a few Arkansas Blacks tossed in.  I added a little over two tablespoons of Ceylon cinnamon as the only seasoning.  Having the sauce in a pot facilitates heating it back up--it will have cooled during milling--before ladling it into the jars.

Once the other pot is emptied of apple slices, it has to be moved off the stove to make room for the canner.  While the canner is heating up, the jars can be prepped.  Applesauce is one thing that regular-mouth jars work well for; I have a mix of those and wide-mouth in inventory.

The remaining processing step is simply to fill the jars, leaving 1/2" headspace, and processing.  The National Center for Home Food Preserving recommends 25 minutes for hot sauce (I'm over 1000 feet in elevation), but if the sauce isn't really hot, I go 35--and I use atmospheric (non-pressurized) steam canning, as noted previously. Pickyourown.org recommends the same processing time.

That's it.  Acidifying is unnecessary; the pH of the finished sauce is about 3.5, well below the 4.6 threshold.  Three big pots--16 quart and 20 quart stock pots plus the canner--are involved, along with the mill, bowls for sauce, small pot for the lids, funnel, jar lifter, spoons, etc. Cleanup requires time and coordination just like the earlier steps. It ends up looking close to the cartoon I posted before, but it's all good in the end. Total time for all of the above was about four hours (including cleanup).

Addendum:  Here's something interesting.  I did two batches this year; the first one was Stayman and Goldrush, as noted above; the second batch was Arkansas Black, Cameo, and a few Goldrush apples.  The color of the sauce was different; it had a red blush to it.  Shown below is the second batch by itself and then in a composite that includes the first batch (already shown above).

In Praise of the Striped June

I harvested my Striped June (also known as Margaret) apple tree on Sunday (July 19).  This is an old tree, planted through the the diligence and foresight of the man who owned the land before me.  The total take was about 20 pounds, which is maybe a bit small for a mature semi-dwarf tree, but it was neglected for a long time before I began caring for it.  I've pruned it some, which has helped.  This year I neglected it; I didn't thin the crop much and didn't do any spraying (for disease or plum curculio, so I'm just lucky--for now--that the nasty bugs haven't found it).

Despite the name, it usually ripens in July.  Still, that makes it a summer apple.  It's an old variety.  The only way you'll get one these days is to go to a nursery that specializes in old apples, like Big Horse Creek Farm.  Striped June is somewhat tart/sweet.  Partly that might be due to harvesting a bit too soon, but the apples were looking good Sunday, with a few already on the ground.  So I picked it clean.  I'm not out there every day--this isn't in my back yard; it's a ways away--so there wasn't any viable alternative.  As you can see, the apples aren't exactly ready for retail.  Most have some degree of insect damage (though I've verified that mostly it's just a few small divots, not really affecting anything else), and many of them have sooty blotch and/or flyspeck.  Both of those are benign plant diseases that don't affect anything.  They can be rubbed off the skin with a wet paper towel and some diligence if you must, but as far as I know, they're harmless.  They certainly don't affect fruit quality, except for visual appeal.  I also see russeting on a lot of them, not all, and that doesn't bother me, either.

Here's an interesting thing about Striped June/Margaret: According to a Jurassic PDF from Auburn University I stumbled across one day, it's resistant to cedar-apple rust.  Look on page eight of the PDF (which, surprisingly, is searchable).  Early Red Margaret, which I assume is the same apple that I have, was found to be free of cedar apple rust way back in 1908.  I have cedars near where the apple tree is growing.  The woods have cedars here and there, and there was a huge one about 50 feet away from the tree, which I cut down with a friend.  There's still one within 100 yards.  And there are others.  I saw galls on the closest one.  The disease can travel some distance (it's transmitted back and forth between the two species, and others--like serviceberry--get involved, too).  I have another apple out there that has issues with cedar-apple rust, getting it every year (so far).  I planted a modern disease-resistant variety, GoldRush, another of the PRI apples I have, along with a few others.  GoldRush, alas, while resistant to some of the worst diseases plaguing apples, is susceptible to cedar-apple rust.  The new apple trees are too young to set any fruit yet, so we'll see what happens.  GoldRush did have a small one this year but it fell off (as do a lot of the leaves about now). At any rate, my Striped June has always been rust-free (at least for the few growing seasons I have had it).

So did the guy who planted it select it for that reason?  It might date back to the 1960s or so.  Given some of the other things I see out there, it was probably carefully chosen rather than selected at random from whatever was available in the nursery trade back then.

Some of the other resistant varieties in the Auburn circular are available if you look hard enough, but again, you won't find them at a big-box retailer (with the possible exception of Arkansas, which I assume is the Arkansas Black--that's a not entirely uncommon apple, but it's not exactly one of the major ones, either.  It's available from all or most of the nurseries I list at the left).

So now I have 20 pounds of apples to process.  I will probably dry all or most of them, but I might also do something else with some.  As a summer apple, I don't expect a long shelf life.

I never would have planted it, but I'm happy to have it.  I just need to make the time to make the most of it by ensuring none of the harvest goes to waste.