Canning Applesauce

Last Fall some sweet friends gave us a bunch of apples from their trees.  In addition to the apples, she also loaned me the use of her Victorio Food Strainer.  Oh my!  I loved the apples but the Victorio was a revelation.  I was hooked from my first spin of the handle.  Canning is already fun, but the Victorio makes it even funner (I know that isn't a word...I just like it.)  And, yes, I just said that canning is fun.  My sisters are laughing right now.

This year, I saved up my Swagbucks (I love Swagbucks) and used them to buy my very own Victorio Food Strainer from Amazon.  My very own...sigh.  When the box arrived, the kids just got out of my way...they knew I was so excited to get at that thing.  The Victorio my friend lent me was 20 years old and in great shape.  It was good to see the new strainer I took from the box looked exactly the same - no new parts made out of plastic as most things seem to be these days.  I'm hoping to use this thing for the next 30 years!



We broke the Victorio in by making 45 qt of delicious, pink, no-sugar added applesauce.  Yum!

These are the apples we started with on the back porch.  Please ignore the messy shelves of shoes and miscellaneous football equipment.   Another sweet friend allowed us to come help her get apples at her parent's house.  We ended up with 2 laundry baskets and 3 grocery sacks full!  I forgot to take a photo right at the beginning - thus the front basket is already empty.

Apples, well, part of them, washed and quartered.  No peeling or coring needed because the Victorio does it for me.  From here, these apples are put into a big pot on the stove with about an inch of water in the bottom and cooked until they are a bit mushy.

Here's the Victorio hooked onto our kitchen table.  The big white funnel on the top is where the apples are put.  The handle is on the right side. The applesauce comes down the funnel and through a fine metal sieve which is surrounded by the white thing you see above.  The sauce slides down the white thing and into the big bowl in front.  The silver/white looking cone on the left side is where all of the peels and seeds get pushed out the end of the sieve.  They fall into the small silver bowl I put there.  Clear as mud?

The cooked apples get dumped into the bit hopper on the top of the Victorio.  The red thingy is for pushing the apples down into the hole at the bottom of the funnel so a big corkscrew can push them along through the sieve.  Just in case it isn't clear, turning the handle turns the corkscrew.

The applesauce sliding down into the bowl.  Isn't it a pretty color?  Leaving the skins on while it cooks and goes through the strainer gives it the color.

This is the leftovers coming out the end of the strainer.  Isn't it so cool?  I think I love what's in this bowl almost as much as the applesauce.  It's so much faster to skip the coring and peeling parts.  When this bowl gets full, one of the Young'uns will run it out to the compost pile.

Canned Applesauce!

What a blessing!

Did I mention the Victorio is amazing with tomatoes as well?  If I can get my hands on a bunch of tomatoes (ours are looking a bit sad), I'll be making as much tomatoe sauce and soup as I can can.  (Just a little canning humor. Ha.)