When you get a bunch of fresh fruit, it is always tempting to try to do something with it when you know that you won't be able to eat it all at once. Berries get stirred into muffins, bananas are baked into bread, pumpkins end up as pie and apples can be anything from pie to apple sauce. Brilynn at Jumbo Empanadas decided to make up a batch of apple butter, which despite its name, is far more like a soft jelly or jam than actual butter. Her experience, cleverly illustrated, was not without incident and reminds us of one of the fundamental rules of cooking: follow a recipe when it is the first time you're making something. As much a TV chef and other professionals say that you can experiment and play with your food, even they started with a basic recipe from a book, a friend or a relative.
Brilynn's apple butter turned out in the end, but do take her advice and at least read the directions once before beginning. That way you're guaranteed a good result, stress-free cooking and, if you're lucky, you'll feel prepared enough to branch out into other types of fruit butters, including pumpkin butter or pear butter.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
10-09-2006 @ 2:30PM
B said...
I grew up eating my Grandmothers homemade applebutter. My brother and I still carry on the tradition, with at least one of us making it every year.
A couple of hints:
1. Jonathan apples are the best apples to use.
2. Use a crock-pot (slow cooker).
Brilynn's mistake was to make it on the stove. With a crock-pot you just have to chuck the apples in a crock pot, peels on, with sugar and vinegar and crank it to the max. Wait 12 hours and mash the remains through a sieve. Add cinnamon and jar with paraffin.
Once you know the trick of the crock-pot, this is a really easy recipe to execute. Otherwise, you be cleaning sticky residue off your stove for years.
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10-09-2006 @ 6:57PM
Carol said...
As the poster above stated, the key to good apple butter is long slow cooking. You simply can't achieve the same results in a microwave. I've never thought about using my crockpot -- I'll have to give it a try. At the very least, the smell would be fabulous.
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10-09-2006 @ 7:20PM
Dr. Electro said...
I will never forget the aroma of fresh apple butter being cooked. Mom always used a big, cast iron kettle over low heat. We had three apple corers and my brother and I would do our darnedest to keep up with mom washing and coring apples. She always maintained that the seed cores made the apple butter bitter.
That said, we would all drool ourselves dry waiting for the batch to finish cooking. We would also bake a big batch of bread at the same time. When it was time to sample the goodies, the freshly baked bread with a dab of freshly churned butter topped with hot apple butter we would all end up gorging like little piggies. No, make that big, gobbling hogs.
Try it, you'll like it.
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10-30-2006 @ 4:13PM
MARK said...
TO TAKE BITTER TASTE MAKE SURE YOU REMOVE STEM AND SEEDS B 4 COOKING
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10-30-2006 @ 4:15PM
MARK said...
MAKE SURE YOU TAKE SEEDS OUT AND STEMS B 4 YOU COOK
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11-11-2006 @ 1:13PM
Sandy said...
My neighbor and I made apple butter in his great-great grandfather's copper kettle over open fire on Saturday. We cored, but did not peel apples, just ran through the food mill and made sauce to put in kettle. Used Jonathan apples and about a half bushel of Melrose to make 3 1/2 bushels. It has a very bitter after-taste and I am so disappointed to have put so much work into a bad end product. Does anybody know if there is a way to remove the bitterness from the apple butter? Any help greatly appreciated!
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