#135 Adventures in Apple Sauce (09/26/12)

Well, as mentioned in #130, we have a LOT of crab apples.  This is our adventure in making about 150 pounds of apple sauce.  This post is picture heavy. 

To start the mass production of apple sauce, we needed a plan.  This is what I came up with.  First day we tried this procedure. 

Pick large bowls of apples using the parachute method, holding a sheet under the person picking to catch the apples.  After the first afternoon of picking two bowls at a time, we then switched to picking a Rubbermaid tote at a time, and for the de-bugging (literally) fill the bowls and leave outside while processing the previous bunch. In the picture below, is my wife (left), me (middle), and my FIL (right). 

Here are a few pictures of our crab-apple trees. 

  

We then leave the bowls outside for a while to de-bug.  The freshly picked apples have a lot of lovely lady bugs, and a few other icky things that we try to have vacated from the bowl before bringing into the house. 

Alas, only a portion of them do leave, as this is our capture container that we empty after each bowl set.

  

We bring the mostly de-bugged bowls inside to our sorting station; our couch/coffee table with a chuck-it platter/bucket and a container for the good ones.  When full the good bin is approximately the two large bowls sorted down, which will fill our two cooking pots well. 

 From there we take them to the wash basin; our kitchen sink.

Then, as is, the apples go into the boil pots.  We add water to the pots, just below the top of the apples, about two depths down.

We bring the pots to a boil, and then let them simmer for about an hour.  Till they look like that, and can be smooshed with a spoon.

None of the water gets drained off.  Per put the contents into our food mill. 

Once a pot is process this is what remains, one pot equals about one of these bowls of apples sauce, and a bunch of stem/seed/pulp mess.  In this whole process we found, we have three crab apple trees, one tree that produces rose wildish apples, and one that produces white apples.  The picture below shows the variation of sauces; rose (left), white (Top Right), crab-apples (Bottom Right).  The two wild apple trees didn’t yield much.  The shown apple sauce was the total yield. 

 

We leave the apple sauce in the bowls to cool, usually ends up being overnight, due to timing.  Then we put about 4 cups of apples sauce into Ziploc baggies, in order to freeze them.  This is a very small portion of the apple sauce bags.  Each bag weighs just shy of two pounds, and we have about 150 pounds of apple sauce, so far.

 

While talking with a neighbour, he let us know, apples run in three year cycles, small, medium and lots yield.  This was the LOT’s year.  Our first run at sauce was just picking the apples that could be easily reached from the crab apple trees. 

In our first bunch of turning sauce into something we made fruit leathers with just crab apples and some corn starch.  They were very sour/potent.  The next run we tried something a little different.   We followed this recipe inspired by Sunrype fruit/veggie leathers.

               3 Cups Crab Apple Sauce

               3 Cups of Boiled Carrots

               1 Cup of White Sugar

               1 Cup of Boiling water

               Blend the sauce and carrots together. 

Add the sugar to the water to create syrup

Add Mixture to blender

Mix a bit more. 

Pour onto dehydrator tray liners.

Run the dehydrator for about 8 hours.  This yields about 12-16 fruit leathers.

In an epiphany, we also tried the same recipe substituting carrots for yams (sweet potatoes).  Both recipes turned out quite nice, however fairly sweet.  On the next bunch we are going to try and cut the sugar in half.  Each fruit leather has about one fruit serving and one vegetable serving. 

Once we had finished the adventure of saucing, there were still so many crab apples left in the trees.  That added with the knowledge that next year we might not get as many, we decided to pick more.  Last night we picked another 110 pounds of apples.  We still haven’t picked the trees clean, just got a little higher with a small step ladder.  On our first bunch, we did our first run at actual canning.  We just heated the sauce to boiling again, sanitized the jars by added boiling water then emptying, and putting the sauce directly into jars and adding the snap lids.  This morning, they had snapped.  Yay.  A movie quote comes to mind where a city lady inherits a farm and starts making baby food with the produce.  As she is leaning to can, she says “I will be domesticated.”  We have officially, successfully canned.  We are domesticated. 

I will try to remember to take a photo of the frozen apple sauce, and whatever we can right away, along with a picture of the finished reduced sugar fruit leathers. 

Any suggestions on recipes involving crab apples and sauce would be appreciated.  I think our next trial run, other than leathers, is apple butter.