Wordless Wednesday - Baked Goods

Apple Crisp Before

Apple Crisp After

Apple Pie Filling

I hope everyone had a great Halloween and Samhain holiday. This year I made my first attempt at a more detailed jack o'lantern. I am pretty pleased, but I know for next year to simplify the design quite a bit. Too many fine lines results in me having to break out the toothpicks to hold all the pieces together. Luckily I have a super crafty husband who was great at hiding the toothpicks, so they are not super obvious in holding things together. I am sure glad that we made an attempt. Posting pictures of the Halloween pumpkin always start to set some fear into my soul though, and not for the usual reasons. My mind immediately turns to... yes Christmas. I start to think about all the things that I need to start work on to make sure that the holidays are homemade and happy.

But this is about apple pie filling.... so all those panic filled thoughts of crafting are out of sight and out of mind until I stop writing up this posting. Pie filling! It is a wonderful thing. There is nothing that I find more versatile than having this in my canning arsenal. I can use pie fillings for homemade danishes, pies, turnovers, crisps, cake fillings, pancakes, and cobblers to name a few. Canning pie filling can be a pretty easy and instantly rewarding activity. For doing apples the set up is a bit more complicated. I have a station setup with the washed apples on one side, cutting board in the middle. Once I peel the apples and take out the blossom ends, they get a quick dunk in the lemon juice and water bowl at the top of the cutting board. This helps keep the apples from turning brown and is mostly cosmetic. Once I have the apples cored and sliced, they go into the lemon juice mix again for a little while as I peel the next apple. From there the slices go into the big four cup measuring cup. After I fill the measuring cup generously, I dump any accumulated lemon water back into the first bowl and transfer the slices into the final big bowl. I know that it sounds overly complicated, but it works well for me and ensures that my pie filling looks great.

When I can my pie filling, I like a consistency of store bought. I know that many people do not like the extra thick goop that is in canned pie filling, but I quite enjoy that texture. In order to make sure that you safely can a goop filled pie filling, you need to use Clear Jel. Clear Jel is a specially manufactured corn starch that is safe for canning at high temperatures. If you use flower or arrow root, it will not hold up and from what I understand will separate out and create weird chunks in the filling. I follow the recipe from The Complete Book of Home Preserving from Ball. The recipe from the book has you use a base of apple juice for the filling around the apples. I find that cider gives the best flavor rather than straight up filtered juice. This year I used a combination of a gravenstein cider I found at Trader Joe's as well as the cider we bought on our apple picking trip. The cider is cooked with sugar, spices, and the Clear Jel. A quick tip on working with the Clear Jel is that it works best when mixed with the sugar before adding in the liquid. It makes it less clumpy and easier to stir with less clumps to break up. As the base liquid starts to reach boiling, the Clear Jel will activate, and small clumps of what appear to be burned filling will dot the pan. Don't panic! This is totally normal. Keep stirring constantly, and suddenly, the entire pan will be jelled up pretty solid. Add the lemon juice and then the poached apple slices. Bring it all up to heat and then can following proper procedures.

Now there is one thing I will say about doing this kind of filling... it is super thick! This viscous texture creates all kinds of interesting canning issues. It is virtually impossible to get out all the air bubbles. Try your absolute best. It is also more difficult to get all the filling up to a hot enough temperature to can with out siphoning issues. If the filling gets too hot it will scorch and not taste as great. Make sure you provide a generous inch of head space. Any less and it will be a complete mess. Every time I have done these recipes, for both apple and cherry,  I have horrible siphoning issues. It is imperative that you have towels down when they come out of the water bath. There is typically some of the filling that runs out of each jar and all over the place. I don't seem to have the problem as much with peach, and apple is by far the worst for some reason. Once the jars have sealed and cooled, I take the rings off and scrub down the jars and rings with lots of water and elbow grease. I also make sure to not use hot water as I do not want the seals compromised. Yeah it all sounds like a pain, but it is great to be able to crack open a jar when there is short notice and whip up something that seems rather impressive to last minute guests. The only other suggestion I have for the recipe is halving the amount of nutmeg. I am not sure if it is because we grind our own or if we just do not like a super nutmeg filled pie, but I feel the Ball recipe has too much. This year I halved the amount and am much more happy with the results. Happy canning! Hopefully you can give pie filling a whirl!

Fall Favorite - Apples

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. I really do enjoy this time of year mostly for the foods that are in season. Root vegetables, hard winter squashes, brussels's sprouts, and most of all apples. I love all kinds of apples, and I think that there is not a variety that I have tried that I have not liked in some way. Usually, every fall, my husband and I head up to Sebastopol, CA for their annual Gravenstein festival.  It is a great little fest, and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves apples and that small town feeling of a county fair. This year, however, we decided to try something different. This year we went all the way to Camino, CA for the Apple Hill Growers Association harvest weekends. We drove the two and a half hours from the San Francisco Bay area out to Eldorado county and the foothills of the Sierra mountains. Once there, it was a beautiful drive around the winding hills of the Apple Hill area. There were many different farms that had different kinds of activities and events. You can most likely find a farm out there that will fit the kind of day you wish to have.

Many of the farms had large tents with crafts for sale, pony rides for children, corn or hay mazes, and lots of food venders. We wanted a quiet day picking our own apples instead of prepacked boxes and jostling crowds. It took us a bit, but I figured out which farms I wanted to see. The first farm we wanted to visit was Sun Mountain Farms. We finally found this very small and picturesque farm after winding our way around the larger farms that had more for family type entertainment. Sadly, once we started up the driveway, we saw the dreaded sign: Sold Out. I quickly looked back at the map and picked Pine-O-Mine. We raced back down the road and found this farm. They luckily still had apples left to pick. They were a select grower and nestled amongst their tall towering pines were Granny Smith and Fuji trees; two of our favorite varieties for canning. We intended on only getting a few pounds to can as I am running out of empty jars, but we ended up with a half bushel from off of the trees there. Next we ventured to O'Halloran's Apple Trail Ranch. This was another cute farm that had apples pre-picked and sorted into large bins from cold storage. We got another half bushel from these growers. They had all sorts of varieties such as winesap, Rome, and golden delicious among others. They also had pears there, so we picked some of them up too. This particular farm also had pumpkins for ridiculously low prices. Our jack 'o lantern pumpkin was found amongst the sunflowers that dotted their pumpkin patch.

Yesterday was the start of working through the bushel of apples that we bought over the weekend. I love the delicate smell of fresh picked apples, and it was a delightful thing to wake up to that smell in our house. I decided to make sauce today with any of the marginal apples that could cause our good apples to spoil. Applesauce is a very easy thing to make, and it is a great way to use up windfall apples or those with some soft or bad parts to them. Just make sure to completely cut out the damaged parts and compost those pieces. If you are in good with your local grower, this is a great way to save money on your canning as sometimes you can get bruised and windfall apples for a much lower price than pristine apples. Just be sure to ask someone in the know as often times they keep these apples out of sight.

This year I chose to do the sauce in the slow cooker as I wanted to run a bunch of errands. Cooking it this way would free up my time for other things rather than attending a pot of bubbling apple goodness. I made a full recipe from my book; twelve whole pounds of apples were counted out. I made this sauce with a combination of Fuji, for softness and sweetness, and Granny Smith for a firm structure, sour under notes, and lower juice content. I peeled, cored, and rough cut up all the apples. Now I did not get rid of all the cuttings. Those go into a plastic bag in the freezer for later use making pectin for your canning next year or into apple syrup for pancakes. Don't let these things go to waste! Now many people like a totally smooth applesauce, in that case, do not worry about peeling or coring the apples. Just remove the blossom end of the apple and compost that. The blossom end has enzymes that can weaken the natural pectin in the apples. You can then just run the cooked down apples through a food mill right before canning.

The hubby and I personally like chunky applesauce, so the extra peeling and coring are necessary as a food mill is not an option. Once I had the slow cooker as packed to capacity as possible, I added a tiny bit of water to aid the cooking and a very scant cup of sugar. You can feel free to omit the sugar if you want an unsweetened sauce. I also added four tablespoons of lemon juice to help retain the color as well as for added acidity. This is one of those wonderful "set it and forget it" kind of things. I went about my day running errands and picking up around the house. When I would breeze through the kitchen, I would lift up the lid, stir, and chop up the apples in the sauce a bit. After quite some time, the sauce started to finally get saucy and cook down.

After seven or so hours on high, this is what I have. There are distinct areas of sauce and also quite a few big clumps. I could have let this cook longer and continued chopping up the chunks until they were the size I wanted, but dinner needed to be made and these jars needed to get into the water bath. Enter the immersion blender. If you do not have one of these things, I would highly recommend getting one. I never thought I would use one of these as much as I have, but it is a great way of doing many things that would otherwise be a total mess. I am looking at you soup recipes that say to blend them up in a food processor. Now the whole point of not running this through a food mill is that I want some chunkiness, so when I used the blender I only blended up certain areas. I made sure that, even though the immersion blender is a blast to use, I only pulsed it around a few areas.

From here you should taste your sauce. Add sugar if you need to make it sweeter. You can also add spices such as cinnamon, cloves, mace, or nutmeg. I typically choose to not add spices to my canned sauce because I can add it later if needed for a certain recipe. You cannot take it away once it is in the jar after all. Make sure that you leave a generous inch of head space for the jars. I did that this year and still had more siphoning out of the jars than I would like. Perhaps the slow cooker does not keep the sauce hot enough to avoid this problem, or it could be the chunks releasing more of their fluid during the processing. Some day I will figure this out. Twelve pounds made three full quarts and two pints. I also had a little left over for dessert that night. Hopefully this will be enough to get us through to next year... somehow I doubt it!

Fresh Bread and Pie

I tried Reinheart's soft sandwich bread out of Artisan Bread Everyday yesterday, and I have to say that I was very pleased with the results. The dough is rather easy to make and took me only 20 minutes the night before to mix up. The recipe makes two loaves, and since there are only the two of us, I debated cutting the recipe in half. I decided on making the full recipe and trying to freeze half of it after the overnight fermentation. I will let you know the results of this experiment when I need to make sandwich bread again in the coming weeks. The dough the next day was velvety and soft feeling. It was just a great feeling dough.

I segmented into the two loaves, rounded one and placed it into the oiled zipper bag and froze it just like I have done with the lean bread from this book. The other loaf was shaped, placed into the greased tin and left to rise for two and a half hours. I slipped the risen loaf into the oven for 40 minutes, the shortest cook time, and found this beautiful golden brown bread. The crust on the top was just right. I have to say that the gold touch pans from Williams-Sonoma really do a wonderful job with bread and the crispness of the crust around the full loaf.

When I cut it open, I found this beautiful crumb with just the right amount of bubbles in the dough for lightness. It is a more dense bread than store bought to be sure, but it is also velvety and moist. The texture is soft yet firm enough that it does not collapse into a compressed mess. What did I put on this too too decedent bread? Why peanut butter and homemade jelly of course! I know, it seems so unclassy for this royal sandwich bread, but it was what I was craving. Now to just find myself a perfect bread box, so my bread can last a bit longer. Currently it is wrapped up in waxed paper in an attempt to keep it decent for the next few days. I had it for toast this morning, and while the interior is still wonderful, the crust is starting to lose a bit of its crunch.

After bread baking, I went on a quest to find more lemons as I had run out. I needed them to start the next project, apple pie filling. I processed more apples into the dehydrator and then I was off to the races getting the pie filling made. I have to recommend the v slicer or a mandolin if you are thinking of doing apple pie filling or dehydrating mass quantities of apple slices. It really does make fast work out of the slicing, and it also ensures that your slices are all the same perfect size.

Once the slices were treated against browning, they had to be blanched for a little bit to facilitate the canning process by bringing them to a hot temperature. Next the goopy filling that goes between the apple slices was made. I followed the recipe from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, and I think this is another winner out of that book. The Clear Jel really makes it all work well. After the goop was made, in went the apple slices and a quick boil was reached. Then packing them into the jars and into the canner for processing.

I found that this recipe ran a bit short on its estimate of yield. I only got five full pints and a scant sixth when the recipe says it makes seven pints. Perhaps my half circle slices were too large to measure out the 12 cups as exactly as they did in the recipe. No matter as I am sure this will not be my only batch of apple pie filling this year. I am sure once we go apple and grape picking this fall that more will be made.

I can my pie filling into pints rather than quarts because a quart perfectly fills our mini pie pan. This pie was made last night out of the scant pint that was left over. It had just too much air space in the jar to reasonably store it, so I used it right away! Hey, no one is complaining here!

I had some requests for the apple jelly and apple butter recipes that I used for yesterday's blog posting. I will post them tomorrow in the blog. Check back to get those recipes then. Today is a really busy day as it is the first day back for me at 826 Valencia for after school tutoring. I still have some canning I am going to try to get done before I leave for that as well as getting my dance class clothing ready and the house straightened up a bit. I promise wholeheartedly to post those recipes tomorrow.

Apple Jelly and Butter

Yesterday was an intense day in the canning process. I did both batches of apple jelly and apple butter as well as drying more apples in the dehydrator. Apple jelly and apple butter do go hand in hand as the jelly uses only the juice from the fruit, so the butter uses up the spend flesh from the juicing process. The only waste is the skins that are stripped away when making the apple butter. I did a batch and a half of the apple jelly as it has always been one of our favorite things to spread on fresh rolls with dinner.

I rough chopped up the apples after washing them. It was kind of nice not having to peel and core everything. I did, however, remove all the seeds from the apples before putting them in the pot with the water to cook out their juices. An episode of G.I. Joe once had them destroy a blob like monster by running it into an apple orchard. They reasoned that the poison in apple seeds would kill this monster, and it did. Hence, my paranoia of apple seeds was born, and my fear of cooking the apples with seeds present continues to this day. The apples cooked at a low simmer for 30 minutes, filling the house with a wonderful perfume smell. It is one of the aspects of the Gravenstein apple that I really do love. From there, the pulp and juice was carefully and slowly poured into the jelly bag to drain.

Now last year I did my jelly using a pair of nylons as my jelly bag, and this is a wonderful and cheap way to do jelly. I just recommend using a new and nicely cleaned pair when you do this. My kitchen, however does not have any place good to hang a nylon from, so I splurged and bought a Fox Run jelly bag set. I found this to be a nice set so long as one does not over fill the bag. It is held onto the ring with elastic, so if the weight is too much it will pull itself off the ring. My batch and a half of apple jelly was right on the edge. I did not squeeze the bag this year either as I had more time to let it all drain. This jelly bag did a tremendous job of not letting any solids through, so I did not have to restrain the juice before putting it into the pan for the cook.

Here is the small amount of overrun from the jelly. I took this picture from the top, so you could see how clear it turned out. I also had minimal foam to skim which resulted in five beautiful jars of perfectly clear blush colored apple jelly. The especially nice thing about having a little left over is that you can taste the early results of your work. We had this with some bread and soup for dinner. It was very light and fragrant, and the set on it was firm yet spreadable. I could turn the cup over without the jelly moving or sliding. A good set indeed!

From there, I squeezed the pulp back out of the bag and into my newly acquired vintage Foley food mill. This was the inaugural run for this, so I was super excited to try it out. The food mill worked like a charm, and with some prodding and poking, I got all the pulp out that I possibly could and left behind only the small scraps of skins from the pulp. It felt very satisfying to be able to use the spent pulp this year to make the apple butter. If you are not making apple jelly and want to just make apple butter, I posted my sister's wonderful crock pot apple butter recipe last year around this time. I used her spice ratio to season this year's pulp as well.

Cooking the pulp and spices to get the flavors through the mixture made me wish fall was here already. All the sweet smells of apple, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice created the biggest turkey and stuffing craving I think I have felt in a long time. From there it was a quick trip into the jars, sealing them, and then into the water bath. In the end, I had five half pints of jelly to four half pints of butter. I guess that is a good guideline for future jelly to butter recipes, that the butter will be one jar or so less than the jelly side of things.

Today I have already baked some bread using the Reinheart's Artisan Bread Everyday cookbook. It has made me want to dig right in, but I still have to wait for the loaf to cool. Once it has, I have a feeling that I will be digging in for a sandwich! This loaf looks like one of the best ones I have made yet, and I promise to post pictures and baking notes on it tomorrow. This was my first attempt at his Soft Sandwich Bread, so I hope it all turned out. If it tastes as good as it smells, I think I am in for a real treat.

Hopefully I can try out his recipe for pull apart rolls. Those are our favorite way to convey apple butter to your taste buds. Today I am off to take a quick walk to pick up more lemons. I do not have enough for today's canning plans: apple pie filling! I cannot wait to get this done and make up a pie for tonight's dinner, even if it means more peeling and coring. After that, more apples are going into the dehydrator, and then perhaps some work on my velvet wreath. I hope to get it done before the end of August, and it looks like I am rapidly running out of time.

Applebutter Recipe

I had a comment on my apple fair entry asking if I ever got my sister's apple butter recipe. I in fact did, and while I answered in the comments area, I thought I should also post up the recipe here. I hope you enjoy it!

My Sister's Apple Butter:

Ingredients:
4 pounds of apples, peeled, cored, rough chopped
2 cups apple cider
3 cups of sugar, less if your apples are really sweet
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. cloves
1/8 tsp. allspice

Directions:
Place cut apples, cider, and sugar into a crock pot on high for one hour. Turn to low setting, stir, and crack the lid keeping it open with a wooden spoon or similar item. This should allow the steam to evaporate out of the crock pot. Cook on low for around 10 hours, stirring around every once in a while. I cooked mine overnight. Cook until it is reduced to a very thick sauce like consistency. Using a stick blender, blend up the butter until it is like baby food rather than extra chunky applesauce. Add spices to the butter and cook one more hour on a high setting. Pour into properly prepared half pints. Process for ten minutes in a water bath.

I hope you like it, and it works for you!