Skin-on apple sauce
In
my early childhood memories, it seems like my mother was always cutting
up apples. Perhaps she was carefully removing the skins so that
my younger sister could wrap her toothless mouth around them (allowing
me to eat the parts left behind.) Or maybe Mom was making a
"Dan'l Boone apple pie" --- whole wheat crust with barely a hint of
butter, apples cored but not peeled, filling mildly sweetened with a
dab of honey. Often, though, it seemed like she was just cutting
up apples to be cutting them up, and she never minded me snagging one
or two or ten out of her bowl.
Mom's
apple sauce was simply stewed apples, skins left on. Although I
heartily approve of eating fruits and vegetables skin-on so that you
don't lose the vitamins, I like the texture of skinless apple sauce
(which can easily be made at home by stewing apple wedges, then passing
them through a Foley mill to remove the skins.) I invited Mom
over to help me cut up our scavenged
apples, then
experimented with various methods of making skin-on apple sauce.
The best method seemed
to be --- cut the apples into quarters, removing the cores; cook in a
pot with some water until the apple meat begins to fall off the skins;
then blend in the food processor. You're less likely to scorch
the bottom of the pan if you cook up your apple sauce in a skillet
rather than a pot and fill at least a couple of inches in the bottom of
the
pan with water. The result is very much like storebought apple
sauce in texture, but with flecks of skin here and there. (The
photo above shows the result of my experiment.)
I'd be curious to hear
if anyone else has a different method of creating skin-on apple
sauce. Meanwhile, if you're overflowing in scavenged apples (and
you should be --- it's that time of year), you might want to check out
a post I made a couple of years ago about how
to make apple cider in a juicer.
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I make apple sauce by quartering the apples and stewing them, cores, skins and all, in my slowcookers. When they're soft, I run them through the victorio stlye strainer, and the seeds, hard bits and peels come out one side, and the good sauce runs out the chute. The chickens LOVE the waste.
There should be pics on my blog sometime last fall (I'd say Oct). I'd give you a link, but I'm on the wrong computer, and it's no good at multiple windows and link copying.