Homemade applesauce prepared from hand-picked apples is the best, and it’s so simple to make! Use a potato masher to mash the cooked apples for chunky applesauce. Run the cooked apples through a food mill for smooth apple sauce. The secret is to boil the apples with a few strips of lemon peel added. The apple flavor is enhanced by the lemon. A quality cooking apple, such as a Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Fuji, Jonathan, Mcintosh, or Gravenstein, should be used. As soon as you’re finished, it will be either hot or chilled and ready to serve. Delicious with vanilla yogurt or ice cream. Easily freezes and keeps for up to a year in a cold freezer.
| Prep Time: | 15 mins |
| Cook Time: | 25 mins |
| Total Time: | 40 mins |
| Servings: | 20 |
| Yield: | 5 quarts |
Ingredients
- 3 ½ pounds apples – peeled, cored, and quartered
- 1 cup water
- ¼ cup dark brown sugar
- ¼ cup white sugar, or less to taste
- 3 tablespoons lemon juice, or more to taste
- 1 (3 inch) piece cinnamon stick
- 4 strips lemon zest
- ½ teaspoon salt
Instructions
- Stir apples, water, brown sugar, white sugar, lemon juice, cinnamon stick, lemon zest, and salt together in a large pot. Place a cover on the pot and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook until the apples are soft, 20 to 30 minutes.
- Remove pot from heat. Remove and discard cinnamon stick and lemon zest strips. Mash apples with a potato masher.
Reviews
The best applesauce ever! Easy to make, definitely use the food mill. I’m filling up my freezer with this recipe!
Used 2 Honey Crisp apples, the balance being MacIntosh. The result was awesome! Made another batch to freeze. Will try with other apples. Thank you!
Forget your old idea of what you think applesauce tastes like. Make this and your mind will be blown. Seriously. I added white sugar to taste after cooking. Whirled ? of it in the blender to smooth it out and because I did not peel organic Costco apples. Four minutes, natural release 10 minutes in the IP, but half the water. Eat it warm. Top with a broken crunchy granola bar. Absolutely delicious.
Made it and came out GREAT! Pretty much followed the recipe used Cortland apples. Came out pink because of the apples. Again looks and taste wonderful. Will be using this recipe from now on.
This is the best applesauce I’ve ever had. I used Cortland apples and I doubled the recipe. I’ll probably make more because this will disappear fast. The lemon made it awesome! Thank you so much for sharing this outstanding recipe.
Delicious. I will definitely make again. I only used the brown sugar. Not sure if I really needed it as the apples I used were mostly the sweeter types. As another reviewer suggested, I too put the lemon peel in a tea ball to make it easier to retrieve the lemon peel in the end. I use a dough masher to break up the apples once they are cooked. It offers a nice, slightly chunky texture.
Best applesauce I’ve ever had and so easy to make!! My husband absolutely loves it too! I used a crockpot instead and used a blender to smooth it out. Can’t wait to make more!!
I made this in my instapot, cooked on vegetable setting for 8 minutes and used immersion blender to mash. My husband’s new favorite applesauce!
Terrific flavor – will definitely make it again.
This recipe turned out super. It was delicious to eat and quick to make. Only problemn was it was so good it never made it to the freezer. Will be making again.
awesome sauce
Very easy to make. I didn’t make any changes, but next time I might try to make it with lo-cal brown sugar and/or non-sugar sweetener. Apples have plenty of carbs by themselves, so added sugar doesn’t help.
I don’t peel apples as therein lies lots of nutrition. I use an applesauce mill (arm exercise!), no peeling or coring , which draws most of the nutritional content from the peels (minus some fiber) and when in a hurry I use a blender but then I do have to core them. Make with monk fruit in place of sugar and add more cinnamon, because there is never too much for my taste.
The apples were from my tree but they were very small (1”-3” diameter) I tried peeling a couple but it wasn’t easy. Next time, with similar sized apples I’ll blanch them (boiling water for 30-60 seconds, then immerse in ice water for a minute or two…. easy peasy peel.
This was my first time making apple sauce, since I had a lot of apples on hand. In fact I have never been a big fan of applesauce in general. HOWEVER I am a HUGE fan now. This recipe was absolutely delicious, the fabulous spark to the recipe was the addition of lemons (which I am addicted too). Thank you so much for this recipe. AH-mazing!
I added some fresh ground nutmeg and 1/2 tsp cardamom. Ut was amazing.
Great recipe, and very easy! I used to help my mom freeze applesauce years ago peeling endlessly, cutting apples, and then using a pressure cooker. This was far easier; I threw everything in my crockpot and 3 hours later, done. It is an amazing, and very tasty recipe!
Excellent. Very fresh apple taste and the right sweetness- my apples weren’t overly sweet. I had to pick my apples off my trees after hail damage and had been cutting them up and eating them, and today it was time to use the rest of them. I had Golden Delicious and Tydeman’s Late Orange apples. Made this as written except I left the peels on and put the peels that remained in the foley food mill into my blender to chop up more. Sooooo good, I liked the addition of some lemon. I added more ground cinnamon after cooking, my sticks are old. I was going to freeze some but I think I will wind up eating it all!
love this recipe. a keeper for sure! followed as directed used less white sugar.
I’ve never made applesauce from scratch before, so I honestly don’t have anything else to compare it to apart from the store bought stuff – but this recipe is miles and away better. I made it with a mix of golden (very)delicious and red (not)delicious apples – about 2/3 golden and 1/3 red. The only change I made from the recipe was to reduce the white sugar to about 2 tablespoons. And honestly, next time if I use a similar mix of apples I’ll omit it altogether.
I addd some strawberries I had in the freezer that I needed to use up and this recipe still turned out fantastic. If you do that and the berries are still partially frozen, just strain out some of the juice after you cook it all. I knew I needed all the water from the recipe when cooking so followed that to a T. Will make this one again.