How to Make Applesauce

Eric Rochow: So, it's 51 degrees outside here and I'm in my shorts and it's a Labor Day weekend. Is it a Labor Day? Charlie: Yes. Eric Rochow: Alright, and my friend Charlie came up and my sister is here as well, that'll be a treat. One of our apple trees is just dumping apples left and right. So a lot of them are -- I call them tree falls, I don't know what you call them, but they fall off the tree, and they get a little dented and they get a little mushy on maybe on one side or something, but these are perfect for making applesauce. So I thought this afternoon, after we go to the fair, I'd make applesauce. I just wanted to pick some apples. You could I see I've got a bunch here, but these look great, they are beautiful! I'll make some great applesauce. An applesauce is really easy to make. Then I think, we're going to try and can the jars as well. So, I'm going to make sure we have the canning lids. Charlie: Can the jars, ha! Eric Rochow: Yeah. Charlie has an answer about why it's called canning, by the way. Charlie: It's called, look it up on the Internet. Eric Rochow: Yeah. So, what you want to avoid is apples like this. This is the sure sign of Mr. Porcupine, who has come by here, or the deer. This is a Porcupine bite right here, but the deer have a slightly different bite. If there is a yellow jacket on there, you probably want to avoid that. Because it's 51 degrees out here, he's frozen. But don't pick those apples, Porcupine. So my sister is here and Charlie is nice enough to run the camera and I'm going to show you a simple way to make applesauce and Tracy has to find you a recipe and I don't really think you need a recipe for applesauce. You're literally just cooking apples then, and you can do it in a couple of ways. You can run the apples through your apple slicer core, I guess, I remember this from our Apple Crisp show. Ooh! That kind of makes a crikey noise. You can run through this, or you can just throw them whole into your bowl here, cook them down, and then run that through a food mill, which is what we're going to do today, because these are apples that are fallen off the trees. Saw this mushy part here, you know we want to cut up the mushy part. So you just take a knife, cut off the -- the mushy part basically is -- when the apple fell off the tree, it just goes brown as it damages the apple. Then you could take this whole thing and throw out in there. What I like about cooking the apples whole and making sauce as you get, it's a lot more efficient, because if you core the apples and you peel then, you're taking away a lot of the fruit of the apple, that could be made in the applesauce. What you can also do is you can just take these and just you can quarter them and you could cut them, like that, if I can do that, like a professional. But you just core these and throw them in, seeds off, and you hear like this. So this is a little soft spot here, so we just cut that out, throw this thing, cut this up, just like that. So here we have a bunch of cored apples, put those on our high tech camp stove here. You could put a little water in, I don't think you really need any, throw that stuff, and just let this start to cook. But you just cut off the bad parts, maybe if you don't have any apple trees, maybe one of your neighbors does, or maybe some guy down the road, just call him up and ask him, you know the worse he can say is, No. Charlie: The worse they can say is restraining order. Eric Rochow: Yeah. No trespassing. So my sister, who does not want to be in the video, keeps on having these little comments over here. And she said, aren't you going to put any spices in? I'm like, well, yeah, we're going to put some spices in. She is like, why didn't you put in at the beginning, because that allows the flavors to melt. So we're going to do that. I only have cinnamon, you could put Allspice and other things. So she also said, you put salt in, because that draws out the liquid faster, so we're going to do that. So I want to keep Tracy happy. So, Tracy how much sugar should I put in? I mean, how much cinnamon should I put in? Tracy: How many apples did you put in? Eric Rochow: 12. Tracy: Do like a-spoon-and-a-half, I like a lot of cinnamons. Eric Rochow: That's about a-teaspoon-and-a-half. Is that too much? Tracy: No, that's good. Eric Rochow: Okay. Tracy: The stems will add a lot of flavor too, I think. Eric Rochow: Now the question is, is what instrument do I implement, do I use to stir this? Because we made pancakes this morning, and we were supposed to be fluffy pancakes, so I was fluffing the egg whites, and I used a fork to turn the egg whites into the batter, I wasn't supposed to do that, I was supposed to use a spatula. So for the last hour, I've been hearing about this. So, will this work? Tracy: Yeah. Eric Rochow: Let's get the spoon sharp. Tracy: Nice! Eric Rochow: Look at that! I mean, it's been like less than ten minutes, and look at the liquid that's coming out of those apples. Charlie said, Wow! You didn't even have to add any more of that. And that's true. It just cooks right out. You can also smash the stuff down with your wooden spatula. Here we are, these are all cooked down. I also like the red color that the skins give it. This didn't take long at all. At the end you want to turn the heat down unless you're going to burn the bottom of the thing. So now, we are going use a food mill. This is a food mill. It's a neat gizmo. It has this kind of pusher disc and these little holes. So it's going to separate out the skins and the seeds and the stems. It's going to let the sauce come through good. We're going to scoop some of this and this smells great, by the way. Just goes in here, and we've turned this, and it goes right through. It's as you're supposed to go backwards like this to scrape off the -- we get the seeds and the skins off the little holes. It comes out like that. That looks great! When you're done with that batch, you back it up like this, and you scoop up all those skins and you'd get rid of the skins. But this is working very well. So, again, you can see where the skins are starting to clog up the hole, so you press down in this and you back it up and it lifts the skins off, and you go through again. That's your applesauce. Charlie: So 12 apples have made how much? Tracy: Four cups. Eric Rochow: That looks like a -- that's a quart like four cups. So you went from this, you went from these kind of beat-up apples that were on the ground, and there is some really applesauce. You can put a little more sugar on this, in different parts of the country, like things sweet or less sweet, I like things kind of less sweet. But this tastes great. So we're going have little taste test here. That's great! It's delicious! I like this! It needs a little sugar. The apples are a little tart. But, you can this, you can just eat it like it is. You can also just freeze this, put it in storage containers and you can freeze it. You just thought up, it feeds your kids. It's great! Alright, there you go. Thank you for watching. Tell your friends about the show. If you have a question, email us eric@gardenfork.tv. If you happen to work for a newspaper or a television station, maybe you want to feature us on your TV station and newspaper, we'd love to do that. We need more press. Thanks for watching! Alright, we'll see you later.