Homemade applesauce

     "So what do you want for Christmas, little girl?"  "I want a food mill to make applesauce!"  And that is indeed what I got!  Thanks to my mother's birthday/Christmas gift, I finally got a food mill of my very own.  It arrived last week and it took me until today to figure out how in the world to put it together.  Not that it is really that hard as it only consists of three parts; the main frame, the disc with the holes and the spinney part (love my technical language?).  I was playing around with it today and it finally just fit together!  I knew that I could finally make the recipe I have wanted to make for a while now: Applesauce!

Applesauce
makes about 2 quarts
Time: About 1 hour

Ingredients:
5 lbs apples, preferably a mixture of varieties, washed
Sugar if necessary

Procedure:

1) Cut the apples in half or, if they're very large, in quarters.  Don't bother to peel or core them. Dump them into a pot with about 1/2 inch of water on the bottom.  Cover the pot and turn the heat to medium.

2) When the water begins to boil, uncover the pot.  Cook, stirring occasionally and lowering the heat if the mixture threatens to burn on the bottom, until the apples break down and become mushy, at least 30 minutes.  let sit until cool enough to handle.  Taste the mixture and add sugar if necessary; usually it is not.

3) Pass the mixture through a food mill, discarding the solids that stay behind.  Freeze or refrigerate.

     It really is that easy!  And that delicious!  I used a mixture of apples, most of which I bought at New Leaf's (a local natural food store).  I used Pink Ladys, Honeycrisp and two random red apples from work.  At first, I was obsessed with poundage and then realized it didn't really matter how many apples I used exactly.  Since they were small apples, I cut most of them in half, put them in the pan and started cooking.  I'd say it took about an hour rather than a half an hour for them to cook down to very mushy, but I was using a stock pot (the narrowness of it probably delayed the cooking time).  Then I put the food mill over another pot, poured some of the mixture in it, and turned.  It was super easy!  And, as Mark Bittman said, it didn't require any sugar!  Yum!  I can hardly wait to tell Marie (who make applesauce every year or so and peels and cores the apples by hand).  She'll flip!




The apple "mush" in the pot




Putting it through the food mill




The homemade applesauce




Can you see the steam?




Of course, you have to enjoy it afterwards!  Yum!