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Homemade Apple Butter-No Sugar!

Apple Butter--No Sugar Added!

I posted recently about our no sugar added peach jam. Along those same lines and to provide some variety we decided to also make some apple butter. Here I'll explain this process, that can be quite easy with the right tools. 

A few weeks ago my uncle asked if we would come pick his apples (apparently they don't use them and the deer come down and eat them, which he doesn't like) and we were happy to take them off his hands. He has two trees, one with a nice, tart green apple and one with a sweeter pink and yellow variety. Having the mix of types provides a good flavor for applesauce and apple butter. 


We started with about three of these banana boxes full of apples since they had a really productive year for apples. 

To make the apple butter we started by making applesauce. That process is pretty simple if you have a Victorio Strainer (Deluxe Food Strainer and Sauce Maker by VICTORIO VKP250).
To prep the apples: wash the apples, quarter them, and remove any bad spots. Then dip them in lemon juice water and transfer to a large pot.

Boil or steam the apples until they are soft and place them in the top of the strainer. Then crank them through (our kids love to help with this part). The applesauce gets pushed through the sieve and into a bowl while everything else (skin, seeds, stem, etc) gets pushed out the end.

Now if you are just making applesauce you have fresh applesauce at this point. You can add sweetner (we didn't) and cinnamon, cloves, etc. (we did:) and then can to preserve. (For our applesauce we processed 30 minutes in a steam canner*).

For apple butter transfer the applesauce to a crock pot. Fill the pot to the top and turn it on. We turned it on to high for an hour to get things started and then alternated between low and high after that (low when we were away or sleeping and high when we could watch it more closely). The main thing is to not let it burn. We also left the lid propped open a little to let steam escape and the apple butter to thicken.

After leaving it overnight plus several hours, we had a nice, thick dark brown apple butter.


I then added an extra step of draining any remaining liquid out through a wire mesh sieve. 



We didn't add anything to our apple butter and it is delicious. We had three crock pots full and ended up with 9.5 pints apple butter and about 24 quarts applesauce.

I also decided to boil down and save the drained off liquid and ended up with a really nice apply, cinnamony syrup. Yum!

*Steam canners are not recommended by the USDA, but we've used one multiple times with no problems. 
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