Applesauce

Can you stand another post about canning at our house?

After our wonderful morning at the homecoming parade, we came back to our house to can applesauce.  I had bought four boxes (half bushel each) of an apple that is new to us called "Banana Apples."  The information at Paul's Patch in Willard said it was good for applesauce.  Oh, yeah, they were right.

Again, we did our canning in the garage.  First, we filled up a big tub (it's next to Lisa on the floor) with clean water and apples.  Then we pulled the apples from the water and cut them into quarters.

 We filled these two pressure cooker pans full twice, plus had one more smaller pot that cooked in the kitchen.  We didn't actually pressure cook the apples, but the big heavy pot works well to cook them in only a little water.  It has taken a lot of experience, and a few burned apples to figure out the best way.

 Once the apples were cooked and soft, they got a run through our strainer. 

 Applesauce comes out the front, peelings, seeds and stems go out the side.  It's always good to get the kids involved.  Lee is learning the "VERY IMPORTANT JOB" of scraping the chute.

 Anna also got a chance to check out the workings.

 My roaster is a good place to hold the hot fresh applesauce, but we ended up filling it plus two stock pots.  At this point, you add sugar to taste.  And of course, it takes lots of tastes to be sure it's just right.  We found that the Banana apples were quite sweet and didn't need much sugar.

Next the applesauce goes into jars.  We waited to process our jars until we had finished cooking all the apples.  That's because we wanted to use our wonderful double burner Camp Chef cooker.

In the end, the last of the 44 jars finally finished cooking after 10:00, but we also had a fabulous dinner, and four people went to the game (Aggies won!).  All in all, a very good day.