The serious business of apple butter

This is the season of pumpkin spice. Just look at all the things flavored with what lots of folks believe represents the best of a big orange gourd.

At the Sullivan home, what you smell this time of year is not pumpkin spice but cinnamon and apples. And sugar. Don't forget the sugar. Lots and lots of sugar.

Yes, dear readers, it's apple butter time.

Younger son came home from Seattle for a week of apple buttering. Over several days a bushel of utility-grade Jonathans purchased at our favorite orchard was transformed into 48 eight-ounce jars of sweet apple butter, three gallons in all.

This process involved our trusty Crock Pot plus a couple of slow cookers borrowed from a friend. I don't know when the Rival company started making Crock Pots, but ours must have been one of the early ones, making it nearly 50 years old. Rival had a factory in my wife's hometown in west-central Missouri just off Interstate 70, so everyone in town had a Crock Pot somewhere in their kitchen.

I don't know who first thought of making apple butter in a slow cooker, replacing the big iron kettle that sat over an outdoor fire. Our recipe calls for things like "caster sugar," which I have been led to believe is another term for "granulated cane sugar." That's what we use, anyway. Lots and lots of sugar.

The recipe, which I've shared with you before, is pretty basic:

Quarter and core (do not peel) four quarts of apples. Put them in a slow cooker on high. Cover (but do not stir) the apples with three cups of sugar, a teaspoon of cider vinegar and a teaspoon of salt. Cook for one hour. Stir, and set heat on low. Cook for 12 hours. (Suggestion: Start this process in the late afternoon, which means you finish up the next morning.)

Put the cooked apples through a ricer and discard the peels. Put the apples back in the slow cooker and add a tablespoon of cinnamon. Stir well, and cook for another hour on high. Ladle the apple butter into washed jelly jars with self-seal lids. Repeat until you run out of apples.

Our bushel of Jonathans filled the three slow cookers twice, plus filling one of the cookers a third time. That's seven slow cookers full of apples in total. This resulted in exactly 48 eight-ounce jars of apple butter, or three gallons (minus what we "tested" during the process). That's enough to feed a small army. But apple butter keeps forever. As a matter of fact, we were surprised to see the date on the open jar left in our refrigerator: October 2012. Five years old. Still yummy.

Something new for this year's apple butter festival was the discovery of Pillsbury frozen biscuits, sold by the bag. You can make biscuits from scratch of course, but why bother when a time-juggling Mrs. Pillsbury, or somebody, came up with frozen biscuits? You bake as many as you want instead of baking a can of refrigerated biscuits and throwing some away. And the frozen biscuits taste more like homemade than anything we've eaten.

As usual, our son calculated our total investment in this year's apple butter production.

There was the Uber from his home to the Seattle airport, air fare from Seattle to St. Louis, BART from St. Louis to Cape Girardeau, a bushel of apples, lots and lots of sugar, jelly jars and lids, FedEx-ing most of the filled jars (plus two quarts of sorghum molasses and two quarts of barbecue sauce from 17th Street Bar and Grill in Murphysboro, Illinois), BART from Cape Girardeau to St. Louis, air fare from St. Louis to Seattle, Uber from the Seattle airport to his home, plus a minder for his cat while he was gone, plus the speedy trip to the emergency vet hospital when it appeared the cat had somehow injured himself (false alarm, it was just payback for leaving in the first place).

As younger son summed it up: This has to be the most expensive apple butter in the world.

But, man, it sure is good.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.