Annual Applesauce Canning

Three Ladies.  Twelve pecks of apples.  Six hours.  One church kitchen. . . 105 jars of applesauce.

Last week two good friends and I spent most of a day at the Congregational Church kitchen making applesauce.  This is our 3rd almost annual session–last year we missed because there were no apples to speak of.  That happens, it seems like one year we get a great harvest, then the next there is an early frost and it’s a wash.  The lesson?  Consider your applesauce to be a “two year” supply and ration it accordingly.  If you get two good harvests in a row, consider it a bonus!

This year we purchased apples–they were 3 peck bags for $10 at a local produce stand.  We purchased $30 worth, and also had about another three pecks from my one friend’s tree. We each brought 3 cases of jars, I brought my bucket of sugar, and we each brought 3 boxes of lids.  The end yield was 105 pints.

For equipment I brought my Victorio Food Mill and the motor attachment (a gift to myself two years ago–AWESOME).  We had two big canning pots with racks, and three different sets of jar lifters, funnels, and the headspace measuring tools.  The church kitchen had 2 huge 6 burner ranges and all the big pots, pans, ladles, knives, cuttingboards, spoons, washcloths and towels you could want.

Here’s what we did:

The apples were scrubbed briefly (we have sooty blotch in the area), quartered and tossed into big pots with a cup or so of water to steam.  We’d stir them occasionally as they cooked to prevent scorching. We got the canning pots filled with water and started them on the stoves to heat.  We continued chopping apples and filling pots as we went.

Once we had a pot of soft apples, I put my food mill to use.  This thing is so slick–it purees the apples and spits all the seeds and skins out one side and the sauce out another.  You just keep feeding and using the masher from the top and it works slick as anything.

Once we had the applesauce we put it back on the stove in a new pot and added sugar to taste (we went through a LOT of teaspoons!) and brought the temperature back up to boiling if it had cooled, stirring to make sure it didn’t stick.    Then hot sauce went into the jars (measuring the headspace of course), they were wiped, lids and bands were added.

Into the canners they went, eight per pot.  So we had 16 pints processing at a time.  Of course the chopping, steaming, milling, reheating, and filling of jars continued–we kind of have a system and everyone jumps in where ever they are needed.

At the end of six hours we were all tired. The kitchen was cleaned, all the borrowed dishes put away, things cleaned and packed back up into our vehicles, and a bag of washcloths and aprons were taken home to be laundered.

We had a whopping 105 jars of sauce, or 35 each, sitting in the church kitchen cooling and waiting to be picked up the next day.

Was it a lot of work?  Sure!  Canning is work (although rewarding work) and doing a massive session is more work.  But the funny thing is, I don’t think that doing 105 pint jars was THREE TIMES more work than if I had done 35 pints by myself.  The work shared made the burden far easier, the superior facility made the work flow much easier and more effective (multiple pots and canners running at the same time) and we were able to enjoy each other’s company, catch up on our family’s lives, and do a whole heck of a lot of laughing.  There is something about the community of an activity like this that is far more than the sum of it’s parts.