Search

Join Culinate! Login or Register

Join Culinate

With a free Culinate membership, you can:

Create your own recipe collections
Queue recipes for later use
Blog your culinary endeavors
Be part of our online community of cooks
And much more…

Join Now

Apple Butter

From the book The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves by Linda Ziedrich

Yield

3½ to 4 pt.

Introduction

As far as I’ve been able to determine, this dark, spicy old-fashioned preserve is uniquely American, and it never seems to lose popularity in this country. Apple butter is a comfort food associated with warm bread, a warm fire, and rain or snow on the windowpanes. The butter is simple to make, and it’s a fine use for wormy or otherwise damaged apples. Try it layered with cheddar cheese on crackers.

Ingredients

	6	lb. cored and quartered apples (unpeeled)
	~	About 4 cups light brown sugar
	1	Tbsp. ground cinnamon
	½	tsp. ground mace or ground nutmeg
	½	tsp. ground allspice

Steps

In a preserving pan, cook the apples over low heat, covered, until they are soft, about 20 minutes. If they are dense, you may need to add a little water or cider at the start to keep them from scorching.
Using the coarse screen of a food mill, purée the apples. Measure the volume of the purée, and add half as much light brown sugar. Add the cinnamon, mace or nutmeg, and allspice, and cook the mixture over low heat (or in an oven heated to 250 degrees), uncovered, until it is thick. This will probably take about 1½ hours. You’ll need to stir occasionally at first and more frequently as the apple butter thickens.
Ladle the apple butter into pint or half-pint mason jars. Add lids and rings, and process the jars in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.

Culinate Kitchen

Plum Cinnamon Jam

The River Cottage Preserves Handbook

Blackberry and Apple Leather

Dinner Guest Blog

World’s best apple

Have you eaten a Gravenstein?

Local Flavors

Have apples?

Make apple butter with star anise

Think before you type

Culinate welcomes comments that are on-topic, clean, and courteous. For the benefit of the community we reserve the right to delete comments that contain advertising, personal attacks, profanity, or which are thinly disguised attempts to promote another website.

Please enter your comment

Comment

I recommend this recipe

Format: Bare URLs are automatically linked; use this style: [http://www.example.com "place text to be linked here"] for prettier links. You may specify *bold* or _italic_ text. No HTML please.