The Best Homemade Unsweetened Applesauce with Apple Cider

I recently discovered the one ingredient that has improved my unsweetened applesauce and I’ll never go back to the old recipe.

As I’m typing this post I can already hear the old Aliya being so mad at me.

When I first started making homemade food from scratch, I got so annoyed when people didn’t use exact measurements.

Like when I started making sourdough sandwich bread and people would say something about the way the dough is supposed to “feel”.

I was like, “Well what about for those of us that don’t know?” haha!

I can say, it hasn’t taken me very long to go from needing exact measurements of everything to knowing the way different recipes should look and feel.

Just a couple years of feeding my family homemade meals and I’ve officially crossed over.

Watch My Family Make Applesauce on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmGIc6s9qBs

Another thing that I’ve crossed over on as far a natural homemade applesauce is concerned is the way that apple looks.

When we first started this journey of finding and eating quality food I was very concerned with the way a piece of produce looked.

I’ve learned that these organic apples don’t always look picture perfect, but most often they are beautiful on the inside.

Obviously, that’s not always true.

Sometimes they are completely rotted out on the inside, but most of the time they are perfect for eating.

Why don’t I want to add sweeteners to my applesauce?

This has been a very long journey for me.

But the long and the short of it is that the average American has increased the amount of sugar they consume by something like 10 times.

I read somewhere that 200 years ago the average American consumed 5lbs a year and that has now gone up to 60lbs.

FOR ONE PERSON!!

With all of the health implications to consuming that much sugar I kinda took it personally.

The last thing I want to do is have knowledge about what it can do to the human body and then continue to feed it to my family.

So in every recipe that I can I try to reduce or in the case of applesauce, completely omit, sugar.

Now this doesn’t mean that we NEVER eat a sweet sugary treat.

We do.

But if i’m going to be eating sugar, or feeding it to my family I want it to be in things that sugar should be in.

I don’t want loads of sugar in my tomato sauce, bread, crackers, juice, etc.

I was dumbfounded when I learned about all the foods that have sugar added to them.

If we’re eating sugar it’s because it’s a specific sweet treat that we’re allowing ourselves to have.

What are the ingredients in homemade unsweetened applesauce?

The sky is the limit here.

• apples
• apple cider
• cinnamon
• allspice
• nutmeg
• cloves
• lemon juice
• other fruit (think strawberry applesauce, blueberry applesauce)

But as with many things, I like to keep mine simple.

So I use apples, apple cider, and maybe some cinnamon.

I’ve heard of people using lemon juice to help enhance the apple flavor, but I haven’t ever tried that.

I may try a batch with and without it this year and see what my family likes best.

How to make unsweetened applesauce taste better?

Depending on the variety of apples you have for your unsweetened applesauce, you may find that it doesn’t taste sweet enough.

But when I think of applesauce I don’t put it in the category of a sweet treat.

So I don’t want to add sugar to it.

I try to reserve sugar for mainly sweet treats.

Well, one day I was talking to my mother-in-law about homemade applesauce and she said to help sweeten it without using sugar try apple cider instead of water.

I thought it was worth a try.

You guys it was genius!!

I use 100% apple cider because I specifically don’t want added sugar, and it turns out so good every single time!

Unsweetened Applesauce Recipe

Unsweetened Applesauce Ingredients

• apples
• apple cider

Unsweetened Applesauce Instructions

Step 1.

The first thing you want to do is wash your apples in cool water before you begin making applesauce.

Step 2.

Next, we took a stock pot, poured the apple cider in it, and started to boil it.

Start with less than you think you would need for the amount of apples you have.

We had about 2-3 bushels of apples we picked off our trees and used a little less than 1 gallon of apple cider for all of that.

You can always add more liquid if needed (water if you run out of apple cider).

I would say I started with 3/4-1c of cider and then added more as we added more apples.

But be patient.

Step 3.

Next, we peeled and cored our apples.

I’ve heard of people leaving the peel on, but we’ve never tried that.

Some peel is on, but for the most part, we remove all of the peel.

Step 4.

Then we add the pieces of peeled and cored apples to our stock pot of boiling apple cider and let it cook down.

Step 5.

As the apples get soft, we used a potato masher to turn the apples into applesauce.

At this point you can decided how “chunky”you want your applesauce.

We like ours extra chunky, but if you want yours smooth you could also use an immersion blender.

That’s it.

Once it’s how your family likes you can remove it from the heat, let it cool, and begin eating, or put it in mason jars for canning.

For the canning process, I just followed the instructions in the Ball Preserving Book that I have.

Which is basically water bath for 20 minutes.

But I do recommend finding instructions for where you live because I know sea levels impact the way something can be processed safely.

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Have a great week! XoXo

Open Your Doors,
Aliya

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