When I was a child, my mom would fix biscuits or rolls with dinner sometimes, and we always had different types of jams, jellies or spreads at any given time. Among these spreads, we would occasionally have apple butter and I loved it. Ours was usually the kind that was semi-homemade. We bought it from our local orchard, which would lead you to believe that it was fresh. One day, however, I read the label and it was packaged in Pennsylvania. It was still delicious, but I felt swindled because I had always thought it was homemade in Maryland at the orchard.
As I went off to college and built my own life, it had a noticeable absence of jams, jellies and spreads. The husband doesn’t really enjoy rolls with jelly as much as I do, so I don’t really buy a variety. We always have the standard grape, and sometimes I buy strawberry, but that is about it.
Then, Pinterest entered my life and informed me that I could make my very own apple butter in my very own crock pot. This was the best Pinterest idea I’ve had since the branch painting of July 2013. It was so simple and more delicious than I could have imagined.
Here’s what I did. You can call it a recipe if you want, but it’s hardly specific:
Peel, core, and slice 10-12 apples (I did 11 red delicious…you pick your kind. Mine were 97 cents a pound.)
Put the apples in the crock pot.
Pour 3/4 cup (or so) of sugar. (The original recipe said 1-2 cups. I may or may not have forgotten that my scoop was 1/2 cup so I added 1 full scoop and half of another scoop…best mistake ever!)
1 tablespoon of cinnamon (I estimated)
1/4 teaspoon of ground cloves (I bought whole cloves and used a Pampered Chef tool to grind them myself. I definitely didn’t measure and I don’t think cloves are even necessary in this recipe. Do what works for you)
Cook all of this for 10 hours, stirring occasionally. I am not sure how important the stirring part is. I put this in at 8:00 pm and stirred it around 10:00 and that’s about it. When I woke up in the morning, I scooped the chunky apple bits into my blender and pressed “puree” for approximately 3 seconds and it was the perfect consistency.
The only issue I had was that it was slightly too watery. Since I made this on a Sunday night, I did not have time to try to cook it down on Monday morning, so I put it in the refrigerator all day and cooked it down when I got home.
Now it is the perfect consistency.
It gets pretty spattery, even with a splatter screen!
I could almost eat it by the spoonful.
This is definitely on the “to make again soon” list!
