Making and Canning Homemade Applesauce

Reader Contribution by Rachel
Updated on November 21, 2022
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Freshly cooked homemade applesauce in glass jars, ingredients, plate, utensils on kitchen table. Horizontal image

Making and canning your own homemade applesauce is an easy way to preserve a bounty of apples. Learn how one cook modified her applesauce recipe for canning.

This year my family got together and made applesauce for the first time. For some magical reason the planets aligned and we had not only 2 bushels of FREE apples, but we also had a free day this weekend to make SAUCE. Happy Dance. And by “free day” I mean, “We are already canning 40 lbs of canning beef this weekend so we might as well …”

Funny how everything has to come at once. We had planned on doing the applesauce, then we got that faithful call from the meat processor that our steer was ready for pick up. All blessings of course … we have meat for our freezer and tasty applesauce for the dead of winter. The work is totally worth it. Plus you get the added bonus of family time, and passing traditions down through the generations.

Since we have never canned anything apple ever before I spent some serious time researching recipes and methods. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised that 9 out of 10 A-Sauce recipes recommended water-bath canning. SWEET.

Modifying Your Applesauce Recipe for Canning

As with every method we altered it for our purposes. Almost every recipe called for simply quartering the apples then cooking them down then scooping them out and into the food mill then back onto the heat then into jars then the canner — seemed like a lot more steps and more mess potential than we were into … plus the thought of all the chemicals and yuckiness on the skin marinating in our sauce kinda gave me the heebies.

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