By popular demand, here is the apple butter recipe from yesterday’s post.  There are MANY other ‘pressure cooker’ apple butter recipes on the internet, but I found that almost all of them use an Insta-pot or a Ninja or a ‘Fast-Cook-Please-Don’t-Explodalator’ (trying my best to imagine what Leonard of Quirm would have called a pressure cooker).

So here’s one for an old fashioned, no fancy electric settings, pressure cooker.  But you could definitely use an Insta-pot if you have one!

We started with this recipe, but kept adding tweaks until we achieved apple butter perfection.

Apple butter is basically spiced apple sauce, but cooked until the sugar caramelises.

While we didn’t use that recipe, The Salted Pepper has a ton of fantastic info about making apple butter, how ingredient changes affect it, how thick it should be, how long it lasts, which I highly recommend reading.

Ingredients:

• 5 lbs apples peeled, cored, and sliced
• 1-1.5 cup brown sugar (depending on how sweet the apples are and how sweet you want the apple butter to be – sugar can be added after the initial cooking, so start with a smaller amount)
• 2 tsp cinnamon (or more.  Cinnamon is measured with the heart).
• 0.5 tsp nutmeg
• 0.25 tsp cloves
• 0.25 tsp cardamon (optional)
• 0.25 tsp salt
• 0.5 cup water (may be apple variety and pressure cooker dependent.  We found the apple butter burnt and stuck to the bottom with the .25 cup water in the original recipe.  More water is always safer, because you can cook off too much, but there is no rescuing burnt)

Cooking:

1. Mix all ingredients in pressure cooker.
2. Bring pressure cooker to a full steam, steam for 10 min
3. Turn off the heat, let it sit and de-pressure for 10 min
4. Open up the pressure cooker.  The apples should be very soft.
5. Use an immersion blender to blend it smooooth.
6. Put it back on the heat and bring to a simmer.  Cook on low, stirring frequently enough to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pot, until it thickens.  (warning, this can be hours).
7. Jar the deliciousness.

Refrigerate for up to 4 weeks or freeze for up to 6 months.

Enjoy on toast, with yoghurt, on ice cream, on porridge, with crackers and cheese…