Pickled granny smith apples

Apple Butter Learn how to make apple butter and fill your house with the aroma of cooking apples, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Our apple butter recipe is great on pickled granny smith apples or spooned into oatmeal!

Elise founded Simply Recipes in 2003 and led the site until 2019. She has an MA in Food Research from Stanford University. Apple butter is made by slowly cooking pureed apples for over an hour. The sugars in the apples caramelize as the puree cooks, giving the apple butter its rich, sweet flavor and dark color. In contrast to what the name implies, there is no “butter” in apple butter.

The name comes from its smooth and buttery texture. Apple butter is delicious on buttered toast. Although apple butter takes time to make, the upfront part is easy. You do not have to peel or core the apples.

The pectin for firming up the resulting apple butter resides mostly in the cores and there is a lot of flavor in the apple peels. After the first cooking, these parts get discarded as the pulp is run through a food mill. This recipe produces a traditional apple butter, which is both sweet and sour, the addition of cider vinegar just intensifying the flavor and giving it its tangy edge. It’s seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and lemon. Apple butter is a smoother, more concentrated form of applesauce. The methods for making the two both start out similarly, by slow-cooking apples until they’re soft and mushy. Don’t love standing at the stove stirring for ages?

These two methods are way more hands-off. Microwave: Instead of cooking the seasoned puree on the stovetop in Step 5, cook it uncovered in a microwave, on medium heat setting to simmer, for around 30 minutes. If you do this, monitor the cooking every 5 or 10 minutes. Slow cooker: In Step 5, transfer the seasoned puree to a slow cooker. Stir once every hour or so.