So about a month and a half ago I went apple picking with my parents, and came home with a half-bushel of mixed apples. That's a crapload of apples. And most of them, while delicious, were godawful ugly - clearly made for cooking rather than eating. So I made apple muffins and apple bread and squash-apple soup and cheddar-caraway apple pie, and munched on the few that looked presentable. And still I had leftover apples. So I made apple butter, two crockpots full. And it's awesome. Here's what I learned in doing so:
1) All those recipes that say to cook your apple butter for 11 hours in the slow cooker? They LIE. 36 hours seems to do the job.
2) You can use apples for this that have started to go soft, because you're cooking them for 36 hours so who the hell cares whether they were crisp to begin with or not, because now they're mush. Delicious, delicious mush.
3) Be careful peeling those soft apples though, because the vegetable peeler will be prone to slip, and peeling your fingertip is a painful experience, especially when you've got another 5 apples to get through and juice gets everywhere and it stings like a motherfucker. On the plus side, your apple butter will turn out dark brown anyway, so nobody will notice a few drops of blood. Consider it 'iron fortified'.
4) Leaving town for a week with a garbage can full of apple peelings is a surefire way to grow a fruitfly colony in your kitchen. Rice vinegar plus orange juice in a cup topped with a funnel is a good way to destroy said colony. Vacuuming up stray fruitflies also helps, and is way more fun than you'd expect.
And the recipe... (as always, amounts are approximate and everything is optional, except maybe the apples. But I bet it would taste good with pears or something instead.)
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| Halfway cooked. |
Crockpot Apple Butter
A pile of apples, peeled, cored, and cut into chunks, enough to fill the crockpot (~1 gallon?)
1 cup or less of maple syrup and/or brown sugar
1 cup apple cider and/or orange juice
1 tbsp Pumpkin Pie Spice, or a mixture of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and allspice, mostly cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla
Zest from 1 orange*
Pinch of salt
*My personal favorite citrus-zesting method: Peel the orange with a vegetable peeler, which gets you the nice orange part without any bitter pith. Then mince with a sharp knife. Saves you grating off your knuckles, especially if you've already managed to peel your thumb.
1) Toss everything in the crockpot. Mix. Cook, covered, on the high setting for an hour or two.
2) Stir. Turn to the low setting. Cook covered for another 12 hours. Stir occasionally.
3) Move the cover to one side just a little so steam can get out. Cook another 24 hours, or until you get sick of waiting. Scrape browned bits from the side and pour condensation from the top whenever it occurs to you. (The point here is to cook off the excess moisture. If you're really impatient you could probably shave off 12 hours by boiling on the stove for a while, but that kind of defeats the whole 'slow-cooker' idea.)
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| With homemade flatbread instead of a bagel. |
Update: My absolute favorite way to eat apple butter: with garlic-chive cream cheese on a toasted pumpernickel or everything bagel, with a little salt and maybe some caraway seeds sprinkled on top. Heaven.
