Green apple crunchy and sweet (not sour)

Juckerfarm has and sellls Rubinola (the apples, not sure about plants). They plant dozens of varieties, from the earliest like Klarapfel to very late ones.

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Thanks Roxi!

A friend gave me some apple butter yesterday made with windfall apples from her garden.
I had to google what it was and what to do with it but it is delicious.

I’m currently drowning under a mountain of plums kindly donated by my neighbour. They collected close to a hundred kilos of them yesterday and there are still just as many left on the trees. It’s a very good year for plums.

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Oooooh, apple butter. Now there’s a trip down memory lane!

Homemade apple butter was a staple in MIL’s midwestern pantry.

One of my favorite of her old timey recipes was apple butter pulled pork. Sweet ,savory, and spicy all at once, slow cooked for hours. Piled high on a chewy bun, covered in her secret slaw. Heart attack special, but oh soooo good.

Note to self: try making apple butter this year…

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I’m a big fan of Boskoop for pies, cakes and puddings. They’re not sour like the Bramleys we get in Britain so you don’t need to add too much sugar. Not that my figure would notice :roll_eyes:

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Had the same reaction but not as far down the memory lane for me. No childhood memories but I did make it myself years ago and now will definitely make it again this year.

It’s traditionally used in Switzerland for exactly that.

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FYI, Aldi has applebutter among their products right now in its gourmet line. 3 chuffs for 350 grams seems a reasonable price.

I find it quite tasty, a combination of apple, cinnamon, butter, and caramel. Unsurprisingly, produced in Belgium.

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Why does everything need added sugars? Apples are already sweet.

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My Hoosier MIL would argue that brown sugar (!!!) is necessary for the distictive taste of apple butter, it’s what gives that deep caramelized flavor. Without it, you have spiced applesauce. Which is also a very tasty treat, by the way.

I tend to make applesauce a lot, largely because it’s easy and quick. Thanks to this thread, though, I’ll be experimenting with apple butter as soon as I have ripe apples to pick. Yep, it is not as healthy… but the flavor is so intense that a little goes a very long way.

So applesauce, apple butter - both are delicious.

BTW, I make both no-sugar applesauce and sugared applesauce (ditto jams). I actually prefer no-sugar, but even though I water bath can both, the no sugar variety has a much shorter shelf life, or requires refrigeration. Hence the need to use sugar in about half the jars I can. I want to preserve as much of the summer harvest as possible - and there is limited room in the fridge!

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I fully agree with her.
But not caramel - why has caramel to be in absolutely everything these days?? I used to like that stuff before it turned up in anything. (We all know it’s not the sugar in brown sugar that does the trick).

I read Roxi’s post with interest … until I reached caramel.

Caramelisation, together with that taste, is the normal result of certain procedures, and often unavoidable. Feel free to keep sulking, and make it yourself, imagining there’s none even though there definitely is.

How you think there’s no caramelisation from cooking on a high temperature for a couple hours, even in the oven depending on your recipe, is a phantasy story I’d love to hear though.

wanna bet Aldi’s caramel does not come from ā€œfrom cooking on a high temperature for a couple hoursā€ ?

However, no need to take my critics personal. I might even buy it to try it anyways. :smiley:

How exactly do you think your caramel is superior to the one in Aldi’s applebutter? Are you seriously claiming that there’s a healthy version of a product that’s easily 50% sugar or more?

You guys should at least try to use your brains every once in a while.

sorry, our brains are so inferior to yours we don’t even bother. God knows what we all would do without you here.

You could try an Aldi version without ā€œsugarā€:

Berryhill Apple Butter

Ingredients

apples, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, spices

Thanks, but no thanks.

As for people’s remarks about caramel - when you slowly cook sugar and apples, you’ll get caramalisation - hence the caramel.

Sugar has been used as a preservative for years - Dulce de leche is milk and sugar and has been around for at least a thousand years.

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The side discussion reminds me of my dad, by no means an accomplished cook, who often had occasion to say, ā€œIt’s not burnt, it’s CARAMALISED!!ā€

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I’m stealing that line from now on.

Thanks for the chuckle!

It’s only happy when making jibes at other people, methinks it should practice what it preaches.
I’m sure we’d manage just fine without it.

I did use the plural ’sugars’ to denote most ā€œxxxcloseā€ products.

Went back to Aldi’s and found the applebutter. The caramel is specified as sugar, water which indeed is caramel as we know it. The only thing that one clearly wouldn’t find in my home-made one is the glucose-fructose syrup (no surprise it’s in there to Bowlie but not to me either).

It tastes very rich and is extremely sweet, far too sweet to me. I’ll use it for baking and cut down on the sugar when I do.

BUT: Next to this applebutter, Aldi offered Spicy Pumkin. Also Gourmet Line, looks like the applebutter jar which is why at first I missed the applebutter.
Now that stuff is REALLY tasty me thinks. Also very sweet yet wonderfully spicy at the same time. Since I got back home I did not bother to add this to anything but just spooned it from the jar.

edit: Actually I just noticed what seemed to be my whole body screaming ā€œwhat’s with the sugar?!?ā€. After only a few spoons full (okay piled up) of that stuff. Just checked: In this jar of 355g applebutter 58g is sugar :rofl:

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