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Monday, November 25, 2013

Unsweetened apple butter

I came across this method at some point, and it got me thinking about trying to make jam or spread without adding sugar: just using the sugar already present in the fruit. I went up a tree with M on Saturday and picked more apples. Small, yellowish-green ones with a pinkish blush on some; M described them as having a rosewater / lychee flavour and I had to agree when I tasted them. So then I had fruit to experiment with. I peeled and cored the apples and cut them into chunks, then blended them til smooth (adding a splash of pineapple juice to get the blender started)*. Then I transferred the whole lot into a saucepan and simmered, uncovered, for 6-7 hours. I occasionally added a splash more pineapple juice if I thought it looked like it was sticking. Probably added about 200 ml pineapple juice all told. It reduced massively (~ 2 full blenders of apple chunks became ~400 ml of thick apple stuff); took on a brownish colour and a slightly caramelised taste. I turned it off when it was really thick and starting to stick a lot. I decided to call it apple butter - it seemed more like apple butter than anything else. It's quite sweet - you're definitely not wondering where the sugar is.

My original thought had been just to extract the juice and reduce that, with the aim of making something more like a fruit molasses - I love all the fruit molasses I've tried (date, pomegranate, mulberry, carob, grape...). But I couldn't bring myself to chuck out so much of the apples so decided to liquidise and then reduce all the flesh and see what happened. I wonder if doing this with grapes or plums or similar would give something stickier and more like a molasses - apples contain a lot of fibre.

But still, this apple-y experiment is pretty tasty.

*Note: I think I might have got smoother results if I'd liquidised after cooking the apples to soften them instead of doing it before cooking.
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