A Delicious Recipe for Slow Cooker Apple Butter

I would like to introduce you to my friend Susan Williams, who blogs at ThatSusanWilliams.com  Not only is Susan smart, funny and a faith-filled woman, she’s also a fantastic cook! I asked Susan if she would be willing to share some recipes with my NanaHood friends occasionally and lucky for you, she said “Yes!”  Please give her a warm welcome and if you visit her blog be sure and tell her I sent you!

From Susan:

Each year, I find myself so impatient for fall that I can nearly taste it, and nothing tastes like fall and my grandmother’s kitchen to me quite as much as slow cooker apple butter. In the town that I was born, Berkeley Springs, WV, where my grandmother also lived, they have an apple butter festival each year in October, where they make huge copper kettles of apple butter outside, over an open flame. My mother must have acquired a taste for it while we lived there, because no matter where we moved, I grew up eating apple butter on my toast at breakfast. So, to me, apple butter speaks of love, and my mother and my grandmother. My roots are in a town that couldn’t be closer to Mayberry, in size, appearance, and spirit.

What a wonderful treat! Slow Cooker Apple Butter and Homemade Biscuits

 

*Slow Cooker Apple Butter: Easy AND Delicious*

A slow cooker is a fur piece easier than cooking over a campfire. Just be prepared to use a lot of apples, and be aware that they WILL cook down to a small fraction of what you had. The flavor, then, is super-concentrated, and luscious. It may LOOK like applesauce, but the intensity of the flavor will knock your socks off. You’re looking for the apples to become the color of copper pennies that have been around for a while: a deep, gorgeous hue. The idea is to cook and cook the liquid out of the apples, for about 9 hours (depending on YOUR crockpot, cooking times may vary), and then add the spices, sugar, and lemon zest for the last hour of cooking. That way, the spices still have their zing. The lemon zest adds acidity and brightness. Put that with a warm biscuit, spread with melting butter, and you have a taste that quite literally made my knees grow weak.

I like to make my biscuits on my cast iron griddle.

I used Granny Smith and Cripps Pink apples. I recommend using a combination of apples for a more exciting flavor profile. I like the tartness of the Granny Smith, and the sweetness of Cripps Pink, and they were both what I had on hand. You need approximately 6 lbs of apples to make it, so, that’s kind of a lot. The yield was only about 3 lbs, when all was said and done. That’s about 4 c. of apple butter. I kept one for the fridge, and froze one. That way, when company comes around at the holidays, I have a wonderful homemade treat in store for them! To read the actual recipe itself, please click this link to visit my blog. I hope you’ll enjoy.

Not having my own huge copper kettle, nor being willing to cook apple butter outside over an open flame, I poured through cookbooks and recipes online, wanting to come up with my own version. I think I called it Boonie Butter, back when I first made it, because I joked with my friends that I had truly moved to the Boonies. The homeschool forum where I posted the recipe went ~poof~ and was gone, and with it went my recipe. But in digging through an old cookbook this week, I found an envelope with my handwriting on it, on the back, and I ~think~ this might be my original recipe for Boonie Butter. Whether or not this IS the original, it is AWESOME!!!! I’m so glad I wrote it down, and buried it in that old cookbook. It’s a treasure!

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