Make Easy Food Mill Applesauce

Limit Prep to Chopping Apples, Not Peeling Them

Oct 28, 2009

Applesauce is fall comfort food, but it's a pain to peel and core apples. Making applesauce with a food mill screens out seeds but uses all the goodness of pulp and skin.

You don’t have to peel or core apples if you use a food mill to make applesauce. Just wash them, cut them into chunks and put the pieces in a large pot with a small amount of water at the bottom. The water is simply to keep the apples from scorching as they start to break down. The apples have plenty of juice, so very little water is needed.

The best apples for food mill applesauce are sweet and soft, so they mush up quickly. It's OK to mix most firm and soft apples, though; they will all eventually break down. Some, like Granny Smith, will be slow to soften, however. Best to save those for pies or for chunky applesauce.

Pink-fleshed apples like Pink Pearl or Rosetta will add a pretty pink tint to applesauce, as will the peels of Idared.

To make applesauce that has a greater richness of flavor, use more than one variety. And use apples you like the taste of. Rosetta, for example, is not a particularly good eating apple, so you'll want to use only a few for color and round out the applesauce with a more tasty variety.

Additions: sugar and spice

Sugar shouldn't be necessary if the selection includes sweet apples, but it can be added if the sauce doesn't seem sweet enough.

Some cooks like to add cinnamon. One way to do this is to throw in a cinnamon stick or two when the apples are cooking. Its flavor will be ground into the sauce when you force the fruit through the food mill.

The Foley Food Mill

The old standby is the Foley food mill made by Mirro (a division of Wearever), a hand-cranked aluminum or stainless steel implement that sits over a bowl.

To make applesauce in the Foley food mill, place the food mill over a bowl, ladle in the apples and turn the handle. The flesh and most of the skins will eventually be pressed through the holes into the bowl, leaving the seeds behind.

That's it. Cut and cook the apples and run them through the food mill, and you have applesauce, the perfect comfort food.

Canning applesauce

Applesauce, especially when made with pink apples, looks pretty in bottles on the shelf.

Pack hot applesauce into sterilized jars, attach lids and rings, and process in a boiling-water canner for 20 minutes for both pints and quarts.

The copyright of the article Make Easy Food Mill Applesauce in Fall Recipes is owned by Fran Gardner. Permission to republish Make Easy Food Mill Applesauce in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.