Apple butter and apple sauce with my Squeezo

I've always wanted a Squeezo. They're just so usefully cool. I wasn't enthused about paying a couple hundred dollars though. And I don't know what garage sales everyone else seems to go to, but I have never seen one at a yard sale, let alone one for $5 (the same holds true for American Harvester pressure canners - nope, don't see those cheap either). 

Anyway, Chris was browsing around eBay and found this beauty, made a bid or two, and ended up with it for $70 including shipping. It even came with the original booklet. Pretty neat.

Apple season finally rolled around and I got out my equipment. Handy pictorial in the booklet for assembly instructions meant it went together quickly and easily.

Ready and waiting

I used the Ball Blue book recipe for apple butter. Cooked the quartered apples in apple cider for 25 minutes and then fed them through the food mill - skins, seeds, and all.

No need to peel or anything else

With a bit of pressure and speed on the handle (I was turning too slowly at first) out came sauce on one side, bad bits on the other.

Separating perfectly

Then I started cooking down the apple butter. Um, yeah, I'd never made apple butter before and didn't realize just how long that would take. I actually started it in my regular stock pot then figured out that I needed more surface evaporation and switched to the dutch oven. Next time I'll do it in the crockpot (uncovered) and let it cook down all morning.

Slowly evaporating

The apple butter finally cooked down enough and I waterbath canned it. The bit of extra that wouldn't fit in the jars got used immediately on toasted homemade bread. Oooh, really good.

Next up was canning apple sauce. Again, used the Ball Blue book and was surprised to see that you don't need to use a pressure canner to do apple sauce. Well, that makes things easier, doesn't it?

My biggest stock pot

I steamed a half bushel of apples for 15 minutes and then fed them through the Squeezo.

A lot of apples

One nifty thing about the Squeezo? You feed the trimmings back through the hopper and process them again. You don't get an extreme amount of extra pulp but certainly enough to make it worth doing. The apple sauce came out great and that completed my canning for the season. Next year I'll do tomato sauce too. Yum!