Canning Apple Butter

This weekend my Ma and I had fun canning apple butter and apple sauce. Last weekend we sent my 14 year old son Alex up on the ladder in the tree to pick apples and we came up with two trash cans full of apples.

Apples from MA's tree

So we got our recipe together and our supplies which consisted of pint jars, a water bath canner, knives to peel, a food mill, cinnamon, cloves, sugar and apples.

Recipe

We peeled the apples together and sliced them into the plan and had a lot of fun laughing and joking around. We missed the kids a lot because they always did stuff like this with us. After we peeled the apples we had to cook them to a soft consistency. We found that the recipe castled for too much water and we were standing there for a long time waiting for the juicy apples to cook down into a thick consistency that we could keep on a spoon so the next batches we lowered the amount of water we added. 

Apples before boiling

After the apples had softened and boiled we to the to the food mill and processed them through that to come up with the butter that we desired. In another bowl we had added the dry ingredients of the sugar, cloves and cinnamon so that after we had processed the butter we added all of that together and took it to the stove to cook it down to a thick consistency that would not fall off the spoon.

                                                                      After Food Mill

While cooking down to proper consistency

While the butter was cooking down we heated our jars in the water bath as well as the lids and after the butter was cooked down we poured it into the jars and cooked it in the water bath for 10 minutes. After that we took them out and let them cool and listened for the lids to pop. 

It was a fun day and we are making apple sauce next weekend when we have Alex because he loves applesauce. Hopefully he will have as much fun as we did. Oh I forgot to tell you during this whole ordeal, MA burnt her hand and we had to take her to the E.R. So please be careful if you try this. Hot water scalds.

God Bless.

B