I thought I remembered that we had a "squeezo" so I went out to our storage shed at my sisters and looked. Sure enough, there it was, laying on the floor in a box. After taking it home and washing it up, I built a small wood shelf to mount it on on top of our fold up plastic table outside on the porch. We have a apple peeler but with the squeezo, all you need to do is wash them, cut them in half, cook them and then put them thru the squeezo. So in we jumped. We washed up a sink full of apples, cut them in half and then put them in our 14 quart All American steamer caner. I put 3 quarts of water into the caner and then secured the top on it. Using a turkey cooker propane burner, I lit the fire and waited for the steam to start coming out of the port. Once that happened, I put the weight on the port on the 5 pound side and watched while the pressure gauge came up to 5 pounds. When it did, I shut the gas off and waited for the pressure to go back down to 0.
After the pressure came back down to 0 making it safe to open the lid, we had the squeezo set up, jars and lids sterilized and were ready to start.
We took turns turning the auger handle and pushing the cooked apple halves down into the squeezo. You can see the applesauce coming down the chute and the peels, core, seeds and other "stuff" coming out of the end into the ice cream bucket. After doing that load of apples, we put the applesauce into a large stainless steel pot, added two heaping tablespoons of cinnamon and one heaping teaspoon of powdered cloves into it and stirred it in. We cooked it on the stove for about two hours so that it would thicken up and then put it in the food processor to make it smooth. We then put it back into the stainless steel pot and cooked it for another hour. After it was thick enough, we put it into pint large mouth Ball jars, put the lids on and put them in the pressure caner. Putting enough water to cover the tops of the jars by one inch, I brought the water to a rolling boil with the lid off and then cooked it for 15 minutes. The book called for 10 minutes while adding 5 extra minutes for the altitude. After the timer went off, I turned off the fire and carefully lifted the bottles out of the caner and put them on the table on top of a towel. I then put a towel over the top of them because there was a slight breeze and they needed to be protected from it.
While the apple butter was cooking, we started working on a second load of apples. Went through all the steps as for the apple butter except we didn't add any cinnamon and didn't cook it after putting it into the stainless steel pot. We transferred it from there into the 1 1/2 pint Ball jars and water bath cooked them.
After putting them onto the table, we covered them and left them overnight like the book said. When canning, the best sound in the world is when you hear the lids click meaning they are sealed. After they have sit for 24 hours, we put them back in the box that the jars came in. One secrete I have about that is I cut the plastic off at the top of the box so it acts as an extra support for the box when the bottles are in. So far, we have made nine 1 1/2 pints of applesauce and 12 pints of apple butter. We still have about 20 pounds of apples to do. We may make some pie apples but will see.
Take advantage of any opportunities you get to learn new skills and especially in preserving food for home storage. And by the way, we have a friend who benefited from our efforts. She has some pigs that really enjoyed the peels and apples that were excessively bruise or had worms. Try caning. It is fun and you can really see the benefits of your efforts and they taste very good.
Bob and LouAnn
