I went to the grocery store today and the produce section was full of beautiful apples! It is that time of year for all our favorite apple recipes, especially apple pie! My mom likes to order big boxes of apples from Utah each year, too many to eat before they go bad. Our favorite thing to make with those apples is applesauce. It is so easy to make this slow cooker applesauce.
I used fuji apples for my slow cooker applesauce, but I think you could use any apple that you love the flavor of. Here is what you do:
Core, peel and slice about 20 apples and place them in your slow cooker or crock pot. I used my apple peeler, corer, slicer and it went really quick. My apples were not very big so 20 filled up my slow cooker. Place the lid on and cook them on high for 4 hours. I did NOT add anything to my apples, nothing. It is just the apples in there.
After 4 hours I took a potato masher and mashed them up. If you like your applesauce chunky, you could stop there. But I was making this for my baby so I wanted it a little smoother. I used a hand held immersion blender and blended up the apples right in the slow cooker until I got the consistency I wanted. So simple!
Since I was going to use this for baby food, I filled an ice cube tray with the baby food and put it in the freezer. Once it was frozen, I took all the cubes out (or stars in this case) and put them in ziploc freezer bags. When it was meal time I just took out a couple stars, popped them in the microwave for about 30 seconds and they were good to go!
I filled up some glass jars with applesauce left about an inch clear at the top of the jar. I sealed it with the lid and placed them in the freezer too. To thaw them out, I just took it out of the freezer and put it in the fridge over night. We ate it so fast that we didn’t really have it any longer than a month in the freezer.
This was some of the best applesauce I had ever had. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to make in the slow cooker! I also loved that there were no additives and felt good about feeding it to my kids.
Stock up on all those apples that are going to be in the stores this season and make up some slow cooker applesauce. You could add some cinnamon and warm it up. Oh now that would be delicious!
Happy Cooking!
Liz
Looking for more fall flavors?
