Back in September, I picked up a bushel of macintosh apple's from a local farm with the purpose of making apple butter. I ended up using a recipe from "Williams-Sonoma The Art of Preserving" by Rick Field and Rebecca Courchesne, which included a very simple ingredient list of apples, apple cider, lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon, and cloves. I love the fact that this recipe is all-natural and I even picked up a locally made Apple Cider for the cider component of the recipe.
This recipe was exceptionally simple, because you start with peeling and coring the apples and simmering them on the stove in the cider, lemon juice, and water until the apples are tender. Then you puree the mixture, return it to your saucepan, add the seasonings and sugar, and cook until the mixture thickens. Then you put the mixture in jars and process them in a water bath to seal them (of course, you would sterilize the jars prior to this). I doubled the recipe, so in total I got five one-pint jars (the recipe states for one batch you would get 5 half-pint jars), so for doubling the recipe, the amounts were perfect. The recipe is delicious and I love the spices in it. It makes an excellent accompaniment to the Oatmeal Molasses bread I talked about in a previous post.
I think that the Williams-Sonoma book is quite a good cookbook for the amateur in preserves. My sister made a really fantastic salsa from it with our garden tomatoes, but she also made a not-so-great pickled tomato recipe from it that tasted overly salty and sour. I would like to try some of the book's jam recipes next year, and perhaps the hot pepper jelly, to see how they turn out.
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