Apples, Part 3

Yesterday's adventures included making apple butter AND canning it.

As you may or may not know, I'm trying to eat healthy (overlooking the Death By Chocolate cake I ate for my birthday) and probably half of my extended family has Type 2 Diabetes or is in some level of pre-diabetes. So my goal was to make apple butter that was, relatively speaking, healthy, and that didn't have a lot of - or any - refined sugar in it.

This was not easy. Most apple butter recipes call for 3 to 5 cups of sugar dumped on top of the apples. I'm sure the apple butters taste great, but apples are kind of sweet anyway, right? Whenever I buy applesauce, I only buy applesauce with apples and nothing else in it and it's perfectly sweet.

I found one recipe that mentioned substituting some type of fruit juice concentrate for sugar and I thought, of course! When I was in junior high my family stopped eating refined carbohydrates and we ate and made lots of things sweetened with fruit juice. This was before no-sugar stuff was so easy to find and before Splenda took over the world.

So this is my apple butter recipe, cobbled together from several recipes I found online and containing no refined sugar.

Kelly's Apple Butter

15 or so apples*, cored and chopped. I used a mix of McIntosh, Cortland, Empire and Liberty because that was what was all jumbled together in our bags from the orchard.
1 1/2 C. white grape juice concentrate
1 C. apple cider
1/2 t. nutmeg
2 t. cinnamon
1 t. cloves
1 t. allspice

Apples in the crock pot
Mix all the ingredients together in the crock pot.
Cook on low for 8-10 hours. Remove lid and continue cooking for an hour or two - long enough to cook away some of the liquid. I stirred the apples every couple of hours to make sure everything was blended together and to mash up the apples as they cooked.

Can the apple butter. I got 4 pints out of this batch because the apples cooked down a lot.
(1 pint is in the fridge. We ate some on toast this morning. Jason is a new apple butter fan)

This was my first experience with canning and I used directions from Southern Plate.** I really liked her directions because they were practical and didn't assume that I had all this fancy canning equipment (which I don't). I also liked them because she said you could get that fancy stuff if you want, but this is the way her mother did it. Good enough for me.

I'm going to put in a plug for one of my favorite kitchen accessories (probably number 3 behind the crock pot and the Whirley Pop): the apple corer, peeler, slicer.


This is a bit dark, but we wanted to show you the magic:
And on another note, Jason got me some lovely Autumn flowers for my birthday.
* Other recipes called for pounds of apples and I just thought, really, how much is a pound of apples? All of my apples are different sizes so there's no continuity. Basically I cored and chopped until my crock pot was almost full.

** Warning: this site contains a lot of amazing-sounding Southern recipes. I kind of want to just hunker down and make some buttermilk biscuits and slather them up with my apple butter on one side of the plate, and sausage gravy on the other. Because when you used to have a Southern accent, saying things like "hunker" and "biscuits" and "sausage gravy" all in the same breath comes naturally.