How to make apple butter - ThunderBucks.com

We all made apple butter at my house the last two days and here is a step by step how to for making apple butter recipe. Makes about 9 - 10 pints.

What you will need

9 quarts of Applesauce, fresh or canned
2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon of allspice
4 cups sugar, or sugar substitute
Jar grabber
Tongs for getting lids out of boiling water
Jar funnel
1 - 6 Qt Crock pot
Large spoons and ladles
1 Large pot to boil jars in after filling them with the apple butter.
Canning jars

If you want fresh apple sauce for the ingredient here is how to make the unsweetened apple sauce fresh!!
You will need a food mill for this though.
Cut and quarter apples. No need to core them
Throw them into a large pot and add just enough water to the pot so that the apples don't burn to the bottom of the pot. About 1/4 to 1/3 full with water. Too much water will water down the apple sauce.
Place pot with apples on stove and once it is steaming you know it is boiling so keep stirring apples so they do not burn to bottom.
Now once the apples are mushy take them off the stove and add them to your food mill.

The mill does a wonderful job of separating the peeling, core and seeds. Apple mush goes in and unsweetened apple sauce comes out.

NOW ON TO THE APPLE BUTTER!!
Fill the crockpot.

Fill the Crockpot almost all the way full with the apple sauce. You may want to keep some apple sauce out and add the remaining applesauce later after the apple butter cooks down.
Add Spices:
2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon of allspice
2 cups sugar (you will add 2 more cups later)
Cook

Set the crock pot on low or medium heat depending on size and power of your crockpot.

Cover it loosely. You don't want to seal it tightly because you want the steam to escape so it can reduce in volume and thicken. We used 2 kebab skewers between the cover and crockpot and they worked pretty good!

Leave it to cook for 6 - 12 hours. How long depends on the size and power of your crockpot, and how thick you want your apple butter to be. The longer you cook it the thicker it will get. Stir it occasionally just to prevent burning. We started ours at night and let it cook over night and it was ready for us in the morning.
Add the rest of the apple sauce and sugar if needed

After it has finished cooking for 6 - 12 hours you can add the rest f the apple sauce if you want. We did not add any apple sauce to it. Add more sugar and spices to taste (may need up to 2 cups more sugar depending on how sweet you want it and how sweet your apples were). After adding more apple sauce, sugar and spices, let cook another couple hours.
Sanitize the jars

Now at this point while the apple butter was finishing cooking, we put the lids and jars in the dishwasher to sanitize them. Leave the jars in the dishwasher on "heated dry" until you are ready to use them. Keeping them hot will prevent the jars from breaking when you fill them with the hot apple butter.
Blend apple butter (optional)

When apple butter is done cooking you may blend it if you want a nice smooth texture to your apple butter. We did not blend it and our was fine.

Now if your apple butter is too thick for your liking, just add a little bit of apple juice or apple sauce and blend it in.
Not thick enough? Just let it cook some more, with the lid off so the steam can escape!
Filling the jars with apple butter.

If the crockpot isn't keeping the apple butter boiling hot, you will need to return the apple butter to the stove to getting boiling hot. It varies from crockpot to crockpot. We set the crockpot to high about 20 - 30 minutes before filling the jars and it was plenty hot enough.

Fill the jars to within 1/4-inch of the top, wipe any spilled apple butter of the top so you get a good seal, seat the lid and tighten the ring around them.
Water bath them.

Put the filled jars in the large pot of boiling water ( also known as the canner) with the jar grabbers and make sure that all jars are covered with at least 1 inch of boiling water. Boil pint jars for 5 minutes and quart jars for 10 min.
Your all done!!

Lift the jars out with the jar grabbers and set them on a towel to cool in a draft free place where they won't get bumped. As they seal you may hear them popping. Sometime it can take as long as over night for them to seal, it just varies from batch to batch. When they are all sealed turn them upside down and make sure the lid does not pop back up. If you can push on all lids with your finger and they don't pop up and down then you know you have good seals.