Making Apple Butter

Earlier in the week I had bought some apples at a produce stand. They had some huge apples called "2nds" selling for 25 cents a lb. After helping my Grandma make her apple butter, I decided to try it on my own. I bought 16 lbs of apples. Elijah and I peeled them on Wednesday, I believe. Here is my wonderful helper. Poor... Can you tell by looking in his eyes that he has a cold?


I showed him how to peel a whole apple without breaking the apple skin. The apples where so big that the peel was a little longer then Elijah is tall. Elijah thought that was pretty neat! Here is Elijah showing how long the apple peel is. (Why do boys aways want to make a face for pictures?)


Here is Elijah's longest peel. He didn't make it around the whole apple, but I thought he did pretty good for his first try at peeling long peels.


We finally got the apples all peeled and cored. The boys decided that a snack of apples was in order. We ended up with two pots of apples to cook.


Here is Josiah enjoying his apple snack. The girls did eat a couple apple pieces, but the boys out did them. I didn't even try to keep track of how much they ate!


Here are my apples on the stove with a little water added to get them started off cooking ok.


After about an hr or so they apples looked like this.


They were all very soft and ready to be put through the food mill.



My Grandma put them through the mill for me, so I don't have any pictures of that. But, after going through the mill, the apple pulp or sauce was ready for the sugar and spices. I didn't get to that part until Saturday though.

Saturday morning I had the apples heating up and the jars ready to go. After the apple pulp was boiling, I added the sugar and spices and then cooked it for a while to thicken it up. When it was thick enough, it went into the jars and then into the hot water bath for 15 min.

It was alot of fun making apple butter and very satisfying know that I now know how to make apple butter. It turned out real good too. I ended up having exactly 6 quarts of apple butter for the winter. I figured it cost about a dollar a jar to make. That's not bad at all. :)