Porkchops and Applesauce... minus the Porkchops

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” - George Bernard Shaw

Last week we received a plastic shopping bag full of apples and knew that no matter how much our son loves apples and we might enjoy them occasionally, we were not going to eat them all before they spoiled. It became the perfect opportunity for further adventures in canning! We decided we would make juice from the apples for our son and also preserve the byproduct - unsweetened applesauce. We also had some mangoes and peaches we had to use up before they went off, so we made mango peach jam.

The mango peach jam was improvised based on instructions with the box of pectin for each. Essentially we had enough of each to mix a half batch worth of ingredients for the mango jam with a half batch of the ingredients for the peach jam and voila! The mixture foamed and boiled up after adding the sugar, so we should get a good set from this batch.

The finished mango peach jam sitting out to cool after a boil bath, as well as a pint of apple juice. We're just going to put the pint in the fridge for our son, so no need to boil and seal, just cool.

We moved on to the apple juice using these instructions for making homemade apple juice. We had to improvise a little because we don't (yet) have a sieve, but we did have a colander and cheesecloth. After cleaning, cutting, and cooking down the apples as per the instructions, we deviated slightly to put the mash in the cheesecloth, move it around with a spoon to free up the juice, and then wring and squeeze the mash to get even more juice out of it.

Wringing and squeezing the mash in the cheesecloth.

The cheesecloth allowed us to really press the applesauce and get more juice from it.

You can see some juice trickling out of the applesauce here.

What we ended up with was one quart and one pint of rather tasty unsweetened, unfiltered apple juice...

We decided not to filter it and instead left it pulpy.

... and two quarts of equally tasty unsweetened applesauce. Yummy!

We decided to leave the peels in for extra fiber and texture. Mmmm.

The juice instructions mentioned that the applesauce could be preserved but didn't provide processing instructions. We used this homemade applesauce recipe for its processing instructions. We placed the jars in the boil bath and processed the applesauce for 20 minutes and the juice for 30 minutes.

We ended up cleaning and reusing the 12-quart stock pot we used to cook down the apples for the boil bath because the pressure cooker pot we use normally for canning wasn;t tall enough to boil quart jars.

After processing we set the jars out to cool. We are very much looking forward to having some of our homemade juice and applesauce when we feel like having some. And we only lost one apple that was too far gone to use.