Pink Applesauce

I made my first batch of pink applesauce in my new sauce maker. We LOVE homemade applesauce at our house, it is so much better than the kind you buy at the store. My mother-in-law would make it a lot and give some to us, but I could never get mine to turn out like her's, so when we were staying at their house she taught me how she does it.

This is the Sauce Maker she got me and my sisters-in-law for Christmas.

In the past when I tried to make applesauce I would always peel the apples, cook them, and mash them and my applesauce was always lumpy and the consistency of mashed potatoes, it wasn't very good .

The way she taught me to do it is to leave the peeling on while cooking the apples and when they're cooked put them through a food mill.

This is what she uses and what she taught me to use. Her's is old but I found one on amazon.com and it's called a chinois. This works great, you just have to stop every once in a while and scrape out the peelings because they will clog it up.

I asked for on of these for Christmas, but someone recommended the sauce maker to her (pictured above) so that's what she got us and I LOVE it. You don't have to peel or even core the apples, just quarter them and cook them. The machine pushes the sauce out of the strainer and all of the unused material (peeling, core, seeds) come out the side, it's so easy.

It does take a little bit more work to put it together and then to take it apart and clean it, so I will have to plan to make a lot of applesauce at once when I do it, it's not worth making small batches, it would end up taking a lot more time. With the chinois it is easy to clean, so I could make a small batch if I were in a hurry and clean up the mess quickly, but not so with the new machine.

My two favorite choices of apples are Golden Delicious and Jonathan (Jonathan apples have red skin and that's what makes the applesauce pink - the kids LOVE the pink) I know there are a lot of different kinds you can use, those are just the two I prefer. And, depending on the apple, I do sweeten it with sugar some. If you get a really ripe Golden Delicious they are sometime sweet enough that you can get by without using any sweetener.

I lived on this stuff when I was pregnant with Clae, so before I get pregnant again I wanted to make sure I had this process perfected so I can be prepared. Now I just need to get good at making homemade bread and I'm all set!