Mhh.. apple sauce (or “Apfelmus”, how we call it in Germany) – it bring’s a piece of my childhood back. My mother used to make fresh latke and we ate the oily-hot things with apple sauce and rye bread – a saxony dish. But my favourite dish was semolina pudding with butter, cinnamon, sugar and apple sauce

Homemade apple sauce

The first time I made this recipe a few years ago, a neighbour brought me apples from the old sort “Klaräpfel”.  It’s an variety of early and delicate dessert apples here in Germany. They aren’t common any more, because you can’t really storage them after you picked them. That’s not really convenient for the modern food trade. But you can find this apples often in old orchards or in a “Schrebergarten” – that’s how we call an allotment garden in Germany. But this recipe will work with other kinds of apples too. I cooked a lot of apple sauce with different kinds of apples over the years after my recipe.

How to adjust the recipe

Maybe you must adjust this basic recipe a little bit – due to the taste of the fruits you want to convert into delicious apple sauce. Here are some tips to do so:

• Apples are products of nature, that means they taste different and have different levels of sweetness. If your apples are particularly sour, then add a little bit more sugar or honey. Are they extraordinarily juicy reduce the amount of cooking water at the beginning – you can add more later if needed.
• You can use sugar instead of honey.
• If you are too afraid to caramelise the honey or the sugar – let it be. The caramelisation definitely adds a special flavour, but you don’t need it to get good apple sauce. Just throw all ingredients into your pot.. uhm.. magic cauldron and enjoy the fun of cooking.
• Feel free to modify. Yes, this is a basic recipe for really delicious, velvety apple sauce – but feel free to use it and to make it your own – maybe by adding cinnamon instead of vanilla, or a hint of allspice, gloves, lavender, mint or sage.

Basic recipe for homemade apple sauce

(makes 4 small jars)

750 g apples (peeled, cored and chopped)
100 – 300 ml water (according to the juiciness of the fruits)
80 g honey
juice from 1 lemon
1/8 teaspoon vanilla bean powder* (alternatively use vanilla extract or a scraped vanilla bean)

Equipment: saucepan, hand held blender*, jars, ladle, big cooking pot, funnel, tongs or a magnetic lid lifter*, kitchen towel

Preparations

• Give the honey into the saucepan and let it caramelise at middle temperature. Attention please – it can burn really fast.
• Add the cleaned, cored and chopped apples and stirr so that they are coated with the honey. After a short while the fruits begin to sweat and the caramel will dissolve into the fruit sauce. Here too: Please don’t leave the pot alone int this stadium, because the fruits can burn. If in doubt, remove the saucepan from the cooktop and let it cool down a little bit.
• Deglaze with a part of the water and the lemon juive, add the vanilla. Turn the heat on an let it simmer till the pieces of apples are soft. If there is not enough liquid, add more water step by step. Stirr the apple sauce now and then.
• Meanwhile boil the clean jars and lids in a big cooking pot, take them out with the tongs/magnetic lid lifter and put them on a clean, wet kitchen towel aside.
• Purée the soft cooked apple bits with your immersion blender* until you have a fine, homogenous mass. If your apple sauce is now too fluid, boil it a little bit down under permanent stirring.  Take a spoon full of your apple sauce, let it cool down a bit (hot things taste often sweeter) and add more honey or sugar if needed. Let it boil again after adding.
• Fill the boiling hot apple sauce with the aid of the ladle and the funnel (the rim of the jars shouldn’t have any sauce on it!) into the jars, close the lids and turn the tightly closed jars immediatly upside-down.
• Let the jars cool down. When you turn the cooled jars back, the lids should be drawn-in.

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