Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make easy, homemade applesauce. Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here! And today I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested, well researched, and perfected recipe. This apple sauce recipe is very simple and takes less than an hour to prepare. I think you're going to love it. Now, the first ingredient you're going to need is three pounds of apples. Now you can use pretty much any apple you'd like for this recipe. I like to use a crisp apple. Today I'm using a blend of both Honeycrisp and Fuji apples. Gala apples, Pink Lady apples, Cortland apples— these are all great choices, and you can use any blend of those that you would like. Now you always want to peel your apples first. Otherwise, if you don't peel them, you're going to end up with little bits of that peel, and they're just kind of tough in there, and they just ruin the texture of the applesauce. And then you'll want to remove the core. If you have a fancy corer, you can use that. I just like to chop my apples around the core and just discard the core. Now we'll chop our apples. And the smaller you dice your apples, the quicker they'll cook, but you don't have to go too small with them. As you can see, I want my pieces to be around the same size so they cook evenly, but they're not super tiny. Now, for this recipe, you're going to need a large pot, or cooking vessel, that will hold all of your apples. And it is important that it have a tight fitting lid. I'm using my Dutch oven, and we can go ahead and add our apples right in there. Then we'll just continue peeling, coring, and cutting our apples until they've all been chopped up. All right, so we have our apples prepped, so the next thing that you're going to need is one cup of water, and we’ll just add that right in there. You could leave this out if you'd like. How much to use really kind of depends on your own personal preference and the initial sweetness of the apples you're using. I have found three tablespoons of granulated sugar to be a really safe bet, and that is exactly what I'm using today. I do have notes on the blog and on the written recipe if you wanted to substitute a different sweetener, or if you wanted to leave out the sugar entirely. We’ll also be adding one tablespoon of lemon juice. And I also like to toss in two cinnamon sticks. I have found that adding these cinnamon sticks doesn't give the applesauce a really intense, cinnamon flavor. It gives a subtle flavor. If you don't have cinnamon sticks, you can leave these out. If you don't like cinnamon, you can leave them out. And if you don't have any, I will also include notes in the recipe so you can use ground cinnamon instead. Now I just like to stir everything together until this is nicely combined— you want to get that sugar mixed in there, and then we’ll take this over to the stove top. Turn your stove top heat to medium, and we're going to bring this mixture to a simmer. I want you to see here, you can see the water’s bubbling and simmering. So what I like to do at this point is reduce the heat a little bit. I do want to keep it at a simmer, and then we will add our lid back on to our pot—or onto our pot for the first time, I guess. At this point, you're just going to let those apples simmer until they are cooked and completely tender. I found this usually takes me about 20 to 30 minutes. Now you can leave the lid on and cook these simmering the whole time, but, just because I want to make sure that my apples aren't cooking to the bottom, I want to make sure things aren't getting too hot in there—I don't always trust my stove to stay a consistent temperature— I do like to carefully check, about halfway through cooking, just take a peek, and you want to make sure that you drain any water right back into your pot. Don't burn yourself with the steam. And just stir the apples briefly. I've had too many bad experiences with my stovetop burning things, so I just like to know what's going on in there and make sure that my apples aren't burning. It's going to make things take a little bit longer, but it's worth it in the end to make sure your applesauce actually turns out, in my onion. All right, it's been 20 minutes of my apples simmering, so let's go ahead and carefully remove the lid and take a peek. Now the way that you want to test if these apples are done is you just want to take a fork and the apples should not give any resistance if you pierce a fork into them. So this, I don't know if you can tell on the camera, but the apples are giving a little bit of resistance. I'd like to see them be a little bit softer, so I'm actually going to put the lid back on. And I'm going to cook these for another, probably, five minutes. Okay, let's take a look. And that's what I like to see. They're giving no resistance to the fork. They're perfectly cooked, so let's go ahead and remove our pot from the heat. All right, if you used cinnamon sticks, you're going to want to carefully, because they're hot, remove them from the pot at this point. Now we're going to turn these apples into applesauce. Now, hopefully you have an immersion blender. If you don't, you should definitely get one. I will link to the one that I use all the time and love, somewhere down in the description. If you have an immersion blender, you're going to want to use that. If you don't have an immersion blender, you can use a potato masher instead, which is going to give you slightly lumpier applesauce. which is fine. Or you can puree the apples in batches in a regular blender, till you have the consistency you’d like. I'm going to be using my immersion blender, and we're just going to blend until we have a nice consistency. Now some people like to have a lumpier applesauce, some people want it completely smooth—you can really just puree as long as you'd like until you get the consistency you want. All right, I am really happy with how this looks right now. I have a couple of stray apple pieces in here. I could puree it a little bit longer, but I actually kind of like that, so I'm going to let that go, but you can do whatever you prefer. At this point it’s a little bit hot, but I do like to taste test at this point and see if I need to add sugar, or if I want to add more cinnamon or any other changes need to be made. This is perfect, so I am happy with it, and I'm not going to be making any changes, so you'll want to let it cool a little bit, and then go ahead and portion it into whatever storage container you're going to be using. And that is how easy it is to make homemade applesauce. I really hope you guys enjoyed this super easy recipe. We've been eating it, basically, non-stop here. Fortunately, my son loves it so it gives me an excuse to keep making it. If you try this one out, please let me know what you think. I always love hearing from you. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you next time. You guys already know I like this, but any excuse to eat more of this.
