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A spoonful of brown apple butter is held above a jar, with green apples and slices on a plate in the background on a marble countertop.
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Apple Butter

This old-fashioned apple butter recipe comes from a 1940s cookbook and skips the slow cooker entirely. You boil four quarts of apple cider down to two, then cook it with Granny Smith apples, sugar, and warm spices until it's thick and dark. Six ingredients, three pints, no pectin, and it's ready in about 2 hours.
Cuisine American
Keyword Apple Butter
Prep Time 30 minutes
Cook Time 1 hour
Total Time 1 hour 30 minutes
Servings 3 Pints
Author Heidi Bruaw

Equipment

Ingredients

  • 4 Quarts Apple Cider
  • 10 Cups Granny Smith Apples peeled, cored, and quartered
  • 2 Cups Sugar
  • 1 Teaspoon Cinnamon
  • ½ teaspoon Cloves
  • ¼ teaspoon Ginger

Instructions

  • In a large pot, boil the apple cider until it is reduced to 2 quarts (about 30 minutes).
  • Add peeled, cored, and quartered apples and cook until tender (about 10 minutes).
  • Drain through a colander.
  • Return to pot and add sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger.
  • Cook until thick. Stir often to prevent burning.
  • Use an immersion blender to finish blending to desired texture.
  • Pour into hot jars and seal or place in the freezer for long term storage without canning.

Notes

Helpful Tips
  • Don't rush the cider reduction. Thirty minutes at a hard boil is what gets you from four quarts to two. If you cut it short, your apple butter will take twice as long to thicken later, and the flavor won't be as deep.
  • Use a heavy-bottomed pot. Thin pans create hot spots, and apple butter scorches fast once the sugar goes in. A Dutch oven is your best friend here.
  • Stir more than you think you need to. After the sugar and spices are in, this is the stage where batches get ruined. Scrape the bottom and the corners every few minutes.
  • Know when it's actually thick enough. Drag a spoon across the bottom of the pot. If the trail holds for a second before filling back in, you're done. You can also spoon a little onto a cold plate and see if liquid pools around the edges.
  • Taste before you jar it. Spices mellow as it cooks. If it needs more cinnamon or cloves, add them now while you can still stir them in.
  • It thickens as it cools. Pull it a touch looser than you want the finished product to be.
  • Freezing is the easy route. If you're not set up for water bath canning, leave an inch of headspace in the jars and freeze. It keeps about a year.
  • Make it a day ahead if you can. The flavor rounds out overnight and tastes better on day two than it does straight off the stove.