Homemade Applesauce

Even though this year Mom's Yellow Delicious Apple Tree didn't produce a lot of apples (because apple trees have one year they produce a lot of apples and then one year they recover by not producing a lot and then the following year they produce a lot again...it's a cycle) this year, she still had enough fall onto the ground that we made some apple sauce about a week or a week and a half ago. As you will notice, these apples are not yellow and so they are not Yellow Delicious apples...they are apples from the "other" apple trees. Yep, my mom has four more apple trees. And since we had already sorted the apples...placing those without worm holes in the fridges (plural) the wormy apples are perfect for making applesauce. First we washed the apple, then started cutting...cutting out all the wormy parts and throwing those parts away.

And then we put them into pots and cooked them down. This week we cut up six buckets of apples. That was enough work that for the first day all we did was cut up apples and cook them down. Then we put them in the fridge...except we didn't have enough room to put them in the fridge...so we put them out on the deck since the weather is cool enough to act like a fridge and waited until the next day.

The pot on the left is almost done cooking while the pot on the right has just begun. You can kind of see the difference in the color of the apples, plus the apples on the left have already cooked down and those on the right haven't yet "shrunked" to their gooey state.

Above is a cute picture of my mom cutting up apples. On the counter behind her are two of the six buckets of apples we cut up.
I am missing a picture to show the cooked apples going through the apple sauce making machine. Mom actually did that all by herself while I had a root canal done on one of my teeth. I would have rather been with her putting apples into that machine than having a root canal that lasted a total of three hours...but that is including the three other cavaties that were fixed. Anyway, back to the picture...here she is pouring apple sauce into the bottles. Next they canned in a bath of boiling hot water, used to seal the lids to the jars.

And ta-da! This is the best applesauce. It's even better than store bought apple sauce. It is so smooth and has no added sweetness...because it doesn't need it. Just pure organic applesauce made with love.