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APPLESAUCE IN BEND

Applesauce is a big deal in our family….we had a small orchard of our own at PUC, where I taught the Home Fruit-Growing class. Every year, we cut up apples together and had a big day in which we made anywhere from 60-100 quarts of sauce, which we gradually ate up through the following year.

When we moved to Tennessee, we had enough applesauce (no kids around to eat it) to last us through the first year, and then I actually had to BUY apples the second autumn we were there. Our kitchen was small, so I used the camp stove on the back porch, and it was pretty unhandy, but we made enough (delicious) sauce for the next year. In 2006, I heard about the county-supplied cannery just up the road in Cleveland, TN, and that made life a LOT easier - I used it two more times, and we brought boxes of 2007 and 2008 applesauce out to Oregon with us.

Of course, Laura and her family were here, and we wanted to share, so I needed MORE applesauce. Leave it to my resourceful daughter, who had already scouted out local neglected apple trees with fruit all over the ground. I asked permission of the homeowners, and Sophia and I picked up buckets of apples from at least four different locations around town—here are some identified to us as Romes
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They were beautiful apples - the tree was inside the yard and was watered regularly along with the lawn. What amazed me was that they were 70-80% clean - no worms….and I’m confident that NO ONE was spraying that enormous old tree. We also had some lovely apples of unknown variety
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I’d guess that fewer than half of them were clean, but that’s pretty good for a tree that hasn’t been cared for. The sauce they gave was kind of grey-green and not very sweet - I doubt they were terribly ripe, although they were falling. Then I found a crab-apple tree, and picked a lot of them to add an interesting flavor and tartness to the sauce - they were present in amazing numbers, and I picked all I could reach from the ground…..but most stayed on for the birds
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Finally, our prize apples!! Two badly neglected trees in someone’s front yard - whenever he watered the lawn they got irrigated, but they didn’t get a lot. The picture was taken after most of the apples were gone - both from the ground and the branches.
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We were a bit late for this fruit - most of the apples were on the ground, and many had begun to rot. Almost all of them had at least one worm, but we got a lot of apple flesh from them, and the clean ones were quite beautiful
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So was the sauce!! A lovely pink color, and as flavorful and sweet as one might wish.
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From these trees, we got LOTS of apples, from which I made (in small batches) 60 quarts of applesauce - some of it canned, and some frozen:
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On the left is the 2008 vintage from Tennessee; then the Bend sauce from the tree of unknown variety outside the property management agency from whom we rent our house; then the lovely tan sauce from a giant Rome tree over on second street near the Sparrow Bakery, and finally the beautiful pink Jonathan sauce which was the best single-variety sauce we made last year. Here they are in the bowl…
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You can see how different they are, and it’s not just the color - the taste of each is quite distinct. When I first started making applesauce with multiple varieties, I kept them separate, but gradually discovered that mixing a number of varieties makes a much better culinary experience - a couple of exceptions might be a good ripe Jonathan or Gravenstein.

Anyhow, early this week I noticed that there were only five quarts of applesauce remaining from last year, so I knew I had to get out and find fruit to make more sauce….we’ll be in Mendocino County, CA next week, and I plan to get apples from Philo unless they are cheaper up in the Hood River area…Gowan’s Oak Tree makes their own applesauce, so they want $25.00 for a 40-pound box, which is a little rich right now. I need to call the orchards north of us and find out what we can get them for there.

Well, that won’t do anything for us now, so I scouted the town for apples - nothing on ANY of the trees we were so happy with last year. Either they are bearing biennially, or they bloomed when it frosted this spring - I lean to the former explanation, personally. There WAS an ancient tree near us
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that was part of a small orchard, but was the only tree with any number of apples on it. They didn’t look too bad
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so we got permission from the nearest house, picked up as much as we could from the ground, shook the tree and picked those up, and then brought 10 or 11 gallons home to process….
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The apples were small - no irrigation all summer, I’m sure - and not really quite ripe, yet. Plus its’ been a long time since I’ve worked with apples this wormy!!
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I don’t think that the usable fruit averaged more than 1/2 of the original apple - obviously some were almost all good, but I simply had to throw many away entire….the flesh was completely honeycombed with “worm tracks”! We ended up with a couple of produce bags filled with scraps, and about 20 quarts of apple fragments.
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By the time I was done, we had about 10 quarts of fairly decent (I can’t lie - it’s no better than that, despite the fact that I thinned it out a bit with apple juice) sauce that will be fine when we mix it with the “good stuff” I’ll make from the Hood River or California apples.
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When we have five or six boxes of apples all here at the same time, it will be a family marathon (he said hopefully) like the good old days at The Homestead, using the SQUEEZO STRAINER (and Boy! has that price gone up since I bought mine!) rather than the FOLEY FOOD MILL I’ve been using here in Bend, so far. It’s not much fun to use, and significantly slower and less efficient than the Squeezo, but it’s a long ways ahead of what my Nenek and I used to make applesauce with…..true, I was small so I didn’t actually have to do much of the work, but I can remember her making applesauce with an OLD-FASHIONED RICER. What you cannot see here (I assume the seller doesn’t have it) is the wooden “pestle” that fit down into the metal basket with the knob at the top that you held and rotated the thing around and around, pressing the sauce through the holes, leaving the skins, seeds, etc. inside the ricer. Slow, messy and miserable….so I try not to complain when I have to use the Foley.

And that’s it for applesauce so far in 2010….tomorrow, I’ll take a pint or so over to the family that gave us permission to take the apples, and next week we may be BUSY making applesauce from Booneville or Philo!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 09/23 at 08:32 PM

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