About the Recipe
This apple sauce is tangy and flavorful. It goes great with pork or chicken. If you can find the deep red ‘Sugar Tyme’ crabapples, like I used in this recipe, the sauce will naturally have a beautiful red color from the apple peels. Otherwise, you may want to add red food coloring.
Ingredients
4 cups of quartered Sugar Tyme crabapples (or other crabapples)
2 ¾ cups of apple juice
3 tablespoons of granulated white sugar
Red food coloring (optional – not required if you have deep red colored crabapples)
Preparation
Put the whole crabapples in a colander and rinse them very well with cold water.
Pull off the stems, quarter them and cut out the cores. Do not remove the peel as there will be hardly anything left to them if you do.
Cutting out the core is easier to do if you quarter the apples as they are too small to use an apple corer.
Pour 2 ½ cups of apple juice into a saucepot.
As you are coring the crabapples, put them in the saucepot immediately so they won’t oxidize.
Once you are done coring all the apples, put the saucepot on the stove and set the temperature to medium.
Bring to a light boil then reduce the heat to simmer and continue cooking for 45 minutes.
Once the apples are cooked, they will turn to mush. You can use a whisk or a potato masher to break-up the mushy apples and separate the flesh from the peel.
Once the apples are cooked, strain them into a bowl using a fine mesh strainer.
Using a large metal spoon or a tablespoon, press all the apples sauce through the screen until only the peelings remain.
Discard the peelings and return the sauce to the sauce pot to continue the cooking process.
Add 3 tablespoons of granulated white sugar and bring to a light boil.
Mix 3 tablespoons of corn starch with ¼ cup of apple juice.
Using your fingers, makes sure all the corn starch is well dissolved into the apple juice.
Gradually incorporate the corn starch and apple juice mix into the sauce, whisking constantly.
Continue simmering for approximately 20 minutes.
If the sauce is too thick, add a bit more apple juice.
If you are not using deep red crabapples (Sugar Tyme), add red food coloring (optional).
You can serve it hot or cold anywhere you would use apple sauce.