Yummy … Apple Butter in the Crock Pot

My friend Hope and I have have been learning to can over the past few years. We’ve canned pickles, salsa, hot pepper & bellini jam, blueberry jam (living in Maine, it would be sacrilegious not to), tomatoes, sauce, string beans and last year we tried apple butter.

Last year we cooked the apple butter on the stove which took somewhere in the area of 8 hours of constant stirring, burns and a lovely apple butter paining on my walls reminiscent of Jackson Pollock. So this year, we decided to do it over 2 days and use our crock pots.

Before we began we had to make sure we had supplies which not only included apples & spices, but also some buffalo chicken dip and some cheese, crackers and pepperoni!

Since our canning recipe book did not have the recipe to make apple butter in the crock pot, but with a bit of googling we found some recipes (see below) that we altered to make our apple butter.

So we set up the crockpots to cook the apple butter on high for the first few hours, then low overnight. We thought that by morning it would be ready to can ….

Obviously, it needed alot more time! So after about 30-some hours I checked for readiness by both methods. When the butter is ready you should be apple to put a spoon in it and have it held upright, or when you put a spoonful on a chilled plate there should not be any liquid separation. Naturally, I had to taste throughout the process to make sure it was good … Oh what a hard job!

So finally it was ready to can! Once the jars were prepared & filled, they were given a 5-minute hot water bath, and while they were cooling I heard all those lovely “Pops!” that let you know the cans are sealed and are preserved properly!

This year I found these neat little labels that dissolve when the jars are washed after all the apple butter has been eaten!

I like to give my friends homemade gifts at the holidays, and I think local canned goods are delicious! So some of you have a hint of what will be in your basket this Christmas!

So if you want to try making apple butter yourself, this is what we did:

Apple Butter Recipe: (makes about 12 half-pint jars)

• A large crock pot
• approx. 10-15 apples, peeled, cored and cut into large chunks or wedges (I like to mix apple types, such as Macs and Cortlands, or Gravensteins and Lady Golds.)
• 2 cups of sugar (We actually used 4 cups of sugar – and split that into 2 cups of white and 2 cups of brown sugar since we had used that much in another recipe)
• 3/4 cup water (We substituted apple cider to make it more tasty!)
• 1 tbsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp cloves, optional*
• juice of one lemon