Homemade Applesauce

Applesauce – YUM!  Started at 8am this morning washing bottles while my husband washed 1 1/2 bushels of apples.  I found on the internet where you could sterilize your bottles and bottle bands by putting cleaned bottles and bands in a 225 degrees oven and baking them for 10 minutes.  I’ve done this for the past two years and it seems to work wonderful……so far – Ha! 
To make our applesauce, we put all washed and quartered apples in a pot of boiling water.  I did not time how long it took but it wasn’t very long.  When I poked them with a knife and the blade went in fairly easy, we removed the apples from the boiling water to a Squeezo Strainer and we were off and running.




The Squeezo Strainer is the handiest little gadget for making applesauce.  All you do is place your cooked apples in the top, plunge apples with plunger while turning the handle.  The applesauce comes out through the strainer while all the seeds, core, and peelings come out the other end.  Simple.


After the strainer process, we dumped all our applesauce into a 20 quart pot.  To our pot of applesauce, we added 1 1/2 cups sugar and it was ready to bottle.




Now all there was left to do was fill bottles, clean bottle rims, place on lids and bands, load the steam processors, put on the dome lids and process for 35 minutes.  I had two processors….one purchased off of E-bay last week.  Sure made quick time of processing.


 



And now the rewards………….20 golden bottles of edible Sunshine!