Apparently I'm not much of an applesauce eater because I still had the vast majority of the jars I canned a year ago in my pantry. I heard about a friend of mine turning applesauce into apple butter using her crockpot, so I thought I'd give it a try. The advantage of using a crockpot is that you can pretty much ignore it all day without worrying about it burning. I'm hoping that by re-processing the applesauce, I'll be extending its shelf-life too (I could just be making this up though). I used the pickyourown.org apple butter instructions as a guideline, but I didn't have all the spices on hand.
I dumped about four pints of applesauce (from the batch that I didn't burn) into the crockpot, added about a half a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of cinnamon.
I left the crockpot to simmer away on the highest setting all afternoon. Since the whole point is to reduce the volume of the applesauce, I left the lid ajar so that the condensation could escape easily. I still didn't have the desired thickness by bedtime, so I popped the crock in the fridge over night. Before plugging the crock pot in the next morning and put the glop in a blender to get it silky smooth. After several more hours (this is a slow process) it was thick enough. I poured it into jars and processed them in a water-bath canner for 10 minutes.
I'm hoping to give the majority of these away as gifts in the near future. I think apple butter is an easier sell than applesauce. This stuff would be great on a cinnamon raisin bagel or mixed into oatmeal. Yum!
