Crock Pot Apple Butter
-By-
Neil Waring
Revered Wyoming Chef, an outdoor cooking expert, admired woodsmen, author, and honored citizen.
At one time I was more active on this blog, hard to be less active than I am now at the rate of one post each year. What happened? I ran out of things I could cook. It seems I spent much more time on my Wyoming Fact and Fiction blog and my western writing blog. These days. For long-time followers, I also write, sporadically, on a gardening blog. But I’m back, today something new.
Late summer in Wyoming and many other parts of America it is apple picking time. It’s not hard to find free apples in any neighborhood. This year I made one of my favorite’s Apple Butter. On a cold winter morning, almost nothing tastes better than Apple Butter on Toast.
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| Pick them off the tree or pick them up from the ground |
Ingredients
Apples :-)
Sugar – brown or white granulated, I prefer brown
Cinnamon, ground allspice, ground clove
That’s it, my friends
Crock Pot Apple Butter
1. Get some apples, if you are lucky someone might bring you a sack or basket full.
2. Peel apples. I like to see how many I can peel in one long peel like my dad used to do. Answer 2, not bad. Don’t remember how many apples I had eight or ten I guess.
3. Cut apples into chunks, small ones. How small? Approximately ½ inch pieces.
4. Keep peeling and chunking until the crock pot is full. I use a small 2-quart cooker for this.
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| Ready to cook |
5. I do not believe extra water is needed, but I put in one tablespoon in the bottom to start. I like to cook everything high and fast, pretty hard with a slow cooker, but add the water to make sure the bottom pieces do not stick and burn. Not sure how they could with me checking and stirring ever hour – but, you never know.
6. After one hour on high, add one cup of brown sugar, two teaspoons of cinnamon, one teaspoon of allspice, and ½ teaspoon of ground clove.
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| One hour after adding seasonings |
7. Turn to low and let it cook. I check every hour or two and mash any large chunks I see with a fork.
8. After six hours I turn the pot to warm – the lowest setting and leave it alone overnight.
9. Spread on toast and enjoy. Keep refrigerated after opening. If you are not hot water sealing the jars, refrigerate all of the butter. Don’t worry it won't last long.
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| Yum - Ready to eat |
Apple Butter Notes – adjust the sugar, cinnamon, clove and allspice to your taste. Many recipes call for twice this amount of sugar, but it seems over the top sweet to me with this much sugar. I love the flavor of clove, but if the butter has too much it will make your mouth feel a bit numb, not sure it that is good or not. How do I know this? Let's just say through experimentation.
Good Luck – My wife uses this in various baked goods, and it makes everything taste better, try it on hot dogs, delicious. Maybe!
Final Note – Do people still call them crock pots? I think in the past twenty years, or so they have become slow cookers. No matter still makes great apple butter and don’t call it jelly.
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| Nice to be back |
Here is a link to my books - Note - gardening book coming soon!
2 comments:
My grandmother used to have apple butter all the time. We have rarely had it since she died, and that was in the very early 1970s. Funny how something like that sticks to your memory.
People have had a bumper crop of apples the past couple of years. It's been amazing. When I have apples (a plumbing disaster polished off my late mother's tree recently) I make a Dutch Oven pie with them. Perhaps I'll try blogging that.
Thanks for the recipe! Maybe I'll give it a try.
Pat - The Dutch Oven apple pie sounds really good. The bumper crop is the reason I decided to try the apple butter. I had forgotten how good it was and cannot stay away from it now - that could be a problem.
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