Apples and Apple Butter

I love having productive Saturdays where the Mister and I have a goal in mind besides eating breakfast and brushing our teeth before noon.

So we went to an orchard about an hour away and picked apples. It's a research orchard for one of the colleges in the state. The offered 27 varieties of apples and they were selling them U-Pick-style for fifty cents a pound.
We picked 52 pounds. I'm wondering if I should mark this in my groceries budget as a big red ERROR in judgment. Fifty dollars was my weekly grocery bill goal, remember? And twenty-six dollars worth of apples is a big old hunk of that. I consoled myself with the idea that I'd likely make lots of yummy and healthy things to preserve and therefore it's planning ahead and not as if I'm sitting them all on the kitchen table to rot until I get tired of flies and decide to throw them all out. (Forgive a girl for a run-on sentence once in awhile.)
So I felt better.

Look at all the apples fallen on the ground!
(You'll have to look past the pregnant lady with her gut hanging out.)


We tried out the nine-foot poles with little baskets on the ends of them, going for the apples highest on the tree. Unfortunately, this made us knock at least half of the apples to the ground, so then we picked them off the ground. Just like fruititarians. (I read about them in the Readers' Digest, these people that only eat fruit that's fallen to the ground--fruit having died of natural causes.)

The people at the orchard encouraged us to eat as many as we wanted while we were picking. I think I tasted about fourteen. I'm not kidding, either. By the time we left the orchard we both felt like we'd swallowed apple peels directly into our lungs.

We stopped at the store on the way back so I could buy some canning jars. I know, I said before that I wouldn't can in my tiny apartment kitchen for lack of space. Some promises are just asking to be broken. I blame my childhood memories.

When I was a kid, my mom was a part of the local auxilliary club. The VFW men and all their old wives would sit around at the legion each Friday evening in September and peel bushels and bushels of apples, then cut them up and throw them in big baskets. Then every Saturday morning, the men would dump the apples into huge copper pots with bags of sugar and cinnamon and cook them over fire pits outside. Once it had turned into apple butter, the old ladies would can it up.

So I called my mom on Saturday and asked her how they did it, exactly.

How much sugar?

Oh, enough to make it sweet, she said.

How much cinnamon?

Oh, I don't know, a little.

Did they process the jars?

No, they just ladled it into hot jars and the heat from the apple butter helped it seal.

So, I say, all I have to do is clean and boil the jars and put the apple butter in and put the lids on and it'll seal?

That should work, she said.

Um, don't I need to process it a little so things don't grow on it?

Well, she chuckles, if it doesn't seal properly, a little mold will grow... But you can scrape it off before you eat it.

Well, with directions like that, who needs a recipe?

I peeled and cut up about fifteen to twenty pounds of Idared apples and tossed them in the crockpot. It was a tight squeeze. I added some lemon juice, white sugar (maybe 2-3 cups?), and cinnamon. I found some old brown sugar I had hanging out on my shelf for awhile and added it to the mix. There was about an eighth of a bottle of apple juice in the back of the fridge and I put it in, too. All I got a picture of was the brown sugar, though.

It was getting dark by the time I had gotten my act into gear.

I began cooking the apples on low yesterday evening and by this morning, they were looking good. I mashed them up a bit.

Then I pulled out my eight-ounce jars. By the way, the Pioneer Woman has some great instructions on canning, much more involved than mine. She even uses the right equipment, like a funnel and tongs. I don't have those things. I fumble for slotted spoons, measuring cups and pot holders and my fingers get burnt. That's what a real pioneer woman would do. Hehe.

I washed my jars (and lids and screw tops) in soapy water before I put them on the stove to heat up in a water-filled soup pot. I wanted the jars hot and sort of sterilized before I dumped in my hot apple butter.

Here are my clean lids. I tossed them into the hot water with the jars a couple at a time, just to get them hot while I was filling my jars.

I used a one-cup measuring cup with a spout to ladle hot apple butter into the hot jars. The jars are 8-oz. so one cup of apple butter will fit about perfectly.

Fill the jar up almost to the brim. I believe the Kerr people would recommend only filling to about 1/2 orr 1/4 inch belows the brim. I got pretty close. Ask me in eight months or so if there's mold in my jars and I'll give you the dirty details.

Then I set a lid on top and screwed the ring on just until it held.

Now this is as far as those auxilliary ladies would have gone. But I tried to finish it off two different ways, just to satisfy my own experimental curiosity.

I processed eight of the jars as usual: Boiling in the pan of water for 10-15 minutes.

The rest I let sit on the counter to see if the lids would seal (and pop) all by themselves, without a hot water bath.

And guess what?

All around is was a 100% success! Every one of those jars sealed nicely, both processed and unprocessed.

(This is how you can tell: You push on the top and if it pops up and down, it isn't sealed. But if you push on the top and it doesn't give, it's sealed--no need to re-process.)

So technically that means I won't have a mold issue.

Yay!
And I don't have to share any refrigerator/freezer space with my freezer jam.

Double yay!

But I still have a huge box of apples left.

Hum.

And I already made an apple pie.

Hmm.

Please advise.