More Applesauce

I made more applesauce on Monday.  Remember I bought apples a week or two ago?  Well, over the weekend an old friend said I could stop by and get any apples from her tree or lawn.  I thought I'd combine them because my friend's apples aren't very sweet and the ones I bought were mostly honeycrisp.  I had maybe 30 pounds total and they combined well.

If you've read my blog for long you've seen my applesauce setup before so today is just the highlights.

I use my Kitchenaid to make the process easy.  You can see the skin/stems/and seeds getting pushed out of the end of the strainer.  

They fall into this bowl below, in the sink.  I usually run these bits and pieces through a second time because depending on how clogged the straining cone is, lots of good applesauce sometimes ends up in the bowl.

This time I realized another benefit of running the bits and pieces through.  It usually makes very thick and fibrous sauce that thickens up sauce that might otherwise be runny.  All that fiber probably makes the sauce much healthier, too.  In the photo below you can see the last bit of applesauce from the second run-through of the offal sitting on top of the bowl.

I ended up with 10 quarts and 9 pints.  One quart was a really old Ball jar that a wide-mouth lid fit, but I a wide ring would not!  How strange!  So that quart went into the fridge for immediate eating.  I didn't want to bother sanitizing another jar and transferring the sauce when the other jars were all ready for the water bath.  I put some in pint jars this time to give to my aunt.  We visit her often and she always feeds us so I figured I'd load her up with some of our staples.

I'm up to about 55 quarts.  I think I need about 100 for the whole year so I'm still on the lookout for apples!

Katie