Three apple butters

Fall brings with it warm days, cool nights, and a more silver light, but harvest time is what makes the season so special to me. What do I like to harvest most? Apples. With those apples, I make pie, of course, but I also make apple butter so I can enjoy the taste of fall all year-round. 

Usually, there are bushels and bushels of apples hanging from the branches of trees up and down the Shore Road. I pick what I want and leave plenty for the deer that grace the woods near my home. Last year was a bumper crop, some say because the winter before was so harsh. I'm not sure the cause, but I do know that last year's relative feast seems to have brought on this year's relative apple famine. There's even one tree that has not a single apple on it. Imagine. 

So, rather than pick for free, I instead went to Johnston's orchards off the Bangor Road. The season is still young, so there were only three varieties available for picking: MacIntosh, Paula Red, and Cortlands. I was familiar with the Macs and Cortlands, great baking apples, but had to try the Paula Reds to be sure they're suitable for making apple butter, and they are. They tasted sweeter than the other two, so I knew they'd work well. 

My goal this year was to make apple butter with as little added sugar as possible. A friend makes it with no added sugar, but by the time I add spices to mine, some sugar is needed to balance the tartness in the apple skins. In the past, I've enjoyed apple butter enriched with mulled red wine. The wine sweetens the butter a bit, and the spices add richness and depth of flavor.

Mulled wine-brandy, apple syrup, blackberry-lime.

This year, I decided to expand on that by making one batch with mulled red wine and brandy. It definitely needed some sugar, but I added only 1 cup to the entire batch, which yielded 9 pints of apple butter. For the other two batches, I decided to try sweetening them using things I already had in my cupboard from years past: apple syrup and blackberry lime syrup. 

Apple syrup is cider that has been cooked down till it's thick, almost like molasses. The blackberry lime syrup was made from cooked blackberries, lime juice, and sugar two years ago. It's fantastic in desserts, and so it seemed like a natural way to sweeten and enrich the flavor of apple butter. 

The basic recipe below started with enough apples to fill a 10-quart stockpot, which filled a six-quart slow cooker with apple sauce, which then cooked down slowly over the course of half a day or more to yield about 4.5 quarts of apple butter. If you'd like to make less, simply cut the recipe. 

Here's the recipe for the mulled-wine enriched apple butter. Basic instructions for the other recipes follow.

10 quarts of mixed apples

2 cups water

1 bottle of red wine

1 cup brandy

1 T cinnamon

1 tsp allspice

1/2 tsp ground cloves

1 cup sugar

I measure my apples by filling the stockpot nearly to the brim with whole apples, then I remove them and clean out the stockpot. Core the apples with a corer or by cutting the apples into sections and cutting off the parts of the core. Put the apples into the stockpot. Once you've put about half of the apples into the pot, add the water and turn the burner on medium. Core and chop the rest of the apples, adding them to those in the pot. Cover the pot. Stir occasionally to keep the apples on bottom from burning. As the water in the pot heats up, it will soften more of the apples, adding to the liquid in the pot. 

While the apples are cooking and softening, put the wine, brandy, and spices to into a medium saucepan. Set over medium heat, stirring occasionally, till the wine begins to give off steam, then reduce the heat to low. Continue simmering the wine mixture either till the apples are cooked or till the mixture has been reduced by half. 

Once the apples have softened, turn the heat off and remove the pot from the heat source. Add the sugar and mulled wine to the pot. Use an immersion blender to puree the contents of the stockpot. Be careful to keep the end of the blender immersed while using it. That sauce is very hot, and splatters will burn. Continue till there are no more apple chunks in the sauce. This can take several minutes.

Carefully pour the sauce into a six-quart slow cooker. It should just about fit. Put the lid mostly on so the sauce will stay hot, but moisture can escape. The sauce will thicken into apple butter over low heat over the course of several hours. This will happen faster if the spiced wine-brandy was reduced over the stove. Stir perhaps every 15 to 30 minutes. I have left this on low overnight before. Doing so produces a skin on the top that can be stirred into the sauce. But if you don't know your slow cooker very well, it's best not to leave it untended. 

As soon as the sauce is sufficiently thick--I like to cook off about 1/4 of the volume--use the immersion blender again to make the butter smoother. Again, be careful. The splatters are very hot. Put into sterile jars and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes. If you don't want to do that, it should keep well in the refrigerator for several weeks. 

For the apple syrup apple butter, I cooked about seven quarts of apples as above and added half a pint of apple syrup and the spices before pureeing it and finishing it in the slow cooker. It will thicken faster because I didn't add a bottle of wine and cup of brandy. Process as before. 

For the blackberry apple butter, I cooked about 10 quarts of apples as above and added a pint of blackberry-lime syrup just before pureeing. I varied the spice mix, using 2 teaspoons of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of allspice, and 1 teaspoon of ginger, which I think goes better with blackberries than cloves.