Dec 14 Apple Butter

• 12 pounds apples
• 1170 grams (2 pounds 9 ounces, or about 6 cups) granulated sugar
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves

Although it's getting a bit late in the season for most canning and preserving, there was still one preservable item I'd been hoping to try out. I've been wanting to make apple butter all year. Fortunately for me, there are still some good apples available at the farmer's market, and, as it turned out, cooking up apple butter was actually a wonderful way to kick off the holiday season. The kitchen was filled with the homey aroma of spiced apples cooking.

I picked out a mix of three different apple types: Galas, Jonagolds, and Fujis, and I picked a mix of ripe and unripe ones. I wanted some unripe ones to help give a strong flavor to the finished butter.

I washed, peeled, cored, and quartered the apples, not being too fussy about the peeling and quartering since everything was going to run through the food mill. I tossed the apples into a stockpot with the apple juice and simmered them for just over thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until they were quite soft.

Once the apples were soft, I removed them from the heat and ran them in batches through the food mill using the finest insert. Then, I rinsed the pot, poured the processed apples in, and added the sugar and spices.

Fruit butters are supposed to be cooked until they "hold their shape on a spoon". This struck me as a typically useless recipe description considering that applesauce (essentially the starting point) practically holds its shape to begin with. So, I went with my best guess. I wound up cooking it somewhere between an hour and half and two hours. You can see the difference between the starting point and where I stopped cooking in the two photos, both in the color and thicker consistency that held a mounded shape better (no longer spread across the bowl).

In both cases you can see there was some liquid that pooled around the fruit puree. I was concerned about that, since the recipe seemed to imply no liquid should be present at the edges in the finished butter, but I'm happy to report that the finished product has kept a consistency I really like with no problems.

Once the butter was done cooking, it was into hot, sterilized pint jars (leaving 1/4" headspace), which I processed for 15 minutes. I got just under 9 pint jars out of the batch, but I only processed 7, since that's all that would fit in my canner. The other two jars I stashed in the fridge and have been quickly devouring.