What apples to make apple butter

The Best Apples for Homemade Apple Butter

Want to make a big pot of homemade apple butter? While you can turn any apples into apple butter, some apples are better suited to the job than others. You’ll save yourself a bunch of time and get tastier results if you put a bit of care into your apple selection.

Choose Softer Varieties

Soft apples work best for apple butter because they cook down faster. Use any of these varieties by themselves, or mix them up to give your apple butter more depth. By using softer varieties, you’ll have delicious apple butter in no time.

• Braeburn
• Cortland
• Fuji
• Gravenstein
• Grimes Golden
• Idared
• Jonamac
• Liberty
• McIntosh

If you’re buying your apples at a farmer’s market or orchard, ask the farmer to recommend varieties or combinations that he or she thinks would work best for apple butter. You may discover varieties that aren’t on this list but work just as well.

Already have your apples? Don’t sweat it you have something other than what’s listed here. While your apples may take longer to cook down, they’ll still make great apple butter. Use a crockpot, so you aren’t tethered to the stove, and you won’t even notice the extra time.

Why Make Apple Butter?

Apple butter is a thick spread that’s made by cooking down apples until they caramelize and develop a dark brown, paste-like consistency. Sugar and spices are added to further flavor the finished product. Apple butter can be used in all the ways that you’d use jam. Spread it on toast and biscuits, or use it to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There are even recipes, like apple stack cake, that call for it as an ingredient.

While you can buy apple butter already made, the grocery store kind pales in comparison, and jars of homemade apple butter tend to sell for upwards of $5 at the farmer’s market. Ouch! Learn how to make your own (it’s easy), and you’ll save money while gaining the opportunity to customize your apple butter to your tastes. Cut the sugar, or swap in a sugar substitute. Use only the spices that you like, and make as much or as little as you want.

Apple butter freezes beautifully and can be canned, as long as you stick to a recipe that’s approved for canning. It makes it easy to stock up for the rest of the year or to get ahead on gifts.

How to Make It

To make apple butter, you first have to turn your apples into applesauce—peeling, coring, cooking, and mashing them. It is the most labor-intensive part of the process, and it helps to have the right tools available. Apple peelers, corers, and slicers speed up the prep work.

Once the applesauce is made, add spices and continue cooking it down until it reaches your desired color and thickness. Apple butter can be made in the crockpot, in the oven, or on the stovetop. The crockpot method is recommended since it’s the least work, and you’re less likely to have your apple butter burn.

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How to Make Apple Butter 4 Easy Ways

Spoiler alert: There isn’t any butter in apple butter.

That’s right, apple butter contains no butter. Instead, the name describes the thick, rich spread you get when apples are slow-cooked for hours until the fruit breaks down into a sweet, smooth paste. That gorgeous nut-brown color? That comes from the natural fruit sugars as they slowly caramelize. And you know how you feel about caramel.

You’ll use the same steps to prep apples to make apple butter, no matter which cooking technique you choose. Simply wash thoroughly cut out the core, then cut into uniform chunks so they cook evenly. No need to peel the apples first.*

After cooking the apples down using the method of your choice, you’ll do one more thing to get that smooth consistency you want in your apple butter: Either process it with a blender or pass it through a food mill.

*Why don’t you peel the apples? Many cooks prefer to leave the skins on the apples as they cook to enhance the flavor and color of the apple butter. If you’re going to press the cooked apples through a food mill at the end, it will remove the skin fragments from the apple butter. If you’re going to use a blender at the end, it will break down the skin into an emulsion.

1. Slow Cooker Apple Butter

Making apple butter used to be a labor-intensive, all-day harvest-time tradition that involved constant stirring to keep the apples from scorching as they cooked. Fast-forward to present day and we get to make apple butter in the modern convenience we call a slow cooker. It’s about the easiest DIY to add to your fall cooking goals and it makes very impressive food gifts. Bonus: Your home will smell like apple heaven.

Follow Chef John’s hands-off technique for making homemade apple butter in your slow cooker.

Ingredients:

• 5 pounds Granny Smith apples, cored and cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1 ½ cups white sugar
• ½ cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• ⅛ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon ground allspice
• ¼ cup apple cider vinegar
• 1 splash water

Instructions:

1. Once you’ve prepped your apples by coring (using a handy apple corer) and chopping them (no need to peel!), place the apple pieces into a large slow cooker. Add white sugar, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and vinegar. Add a splash of water and mix well.
2. Cover and cook on High until apples are starting to soften and release liquid, about 1 to 2 hours. Reduce heat to Low and cook, uncovered, until all the apple flesh is dissolved, or about 5 to 6 hours. Stir occasionally.
3. Puree using an immersion blender until smooth. Continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until darkened and thick, about 4 hours more. Pass apple butter through a strainer or food mill if desired. Seal in a glass container and refrigerate until cool.

2. Instant Pot Apple Butter

Home cook Kathleen Sanders was able to cut down on the cooking time by using the Instant Pot to make Chef John’s Apple Butter recipe: «I made this on my Instant Pot. 7 minutes high pressure and 10 minutes natural release. Then, after I blended it, I slow cooked it on high with a lid on it slightly ajar for 5 hours. It’s SO GOOD. Has a beautiful color and just the right amount of sweetness.»

This recipe for Instant Pot Apple Butter is full of great tips for making apple butter in your Instant Pot, including using the sauté function to speed up the cooking time.

3. Stovetop Apple Butter

If you don’t have a slow cooker, and you don’t mind stirring once in a while, you can make apple butter the low-tech way on your stove. Use a heavy pot with a thick bottom for best results. Try this 5-star recipe for Supreme Apple Butter.

4. Oven-Roasted Apple Butter

This recipe for Apple Butter in the Oven starts on the stovetop and finishes low and slow in the oven. Use a heavy pot, like a Dutch oven, to make this recipe so the apples cook evenly with no hot spots to scorch your gorgeous apple butter.

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Apple Butter

Learn how to make apple butter and fill your house with the aroma of cooking apples, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. Our apple butter recipe is great on toast or spooned into oatmeal!

Elise founded Simply Recipes in 2003 and led the site until 2019. She has an MA in Food Research from Stanford University.

It’s hard to find any apple butter, let alone good apple butter in the grocery store these days. Making apple butter is a great way to preserve the fruits of an apple harvest.

What is Apple Butter?

Apple butter is made by slowly cooking pureed apples for over an hour. The sugars in the apples caramelize as the puree cooks, giving the apple butter its rich, sweet flavor and dark color.

In contrast to what the name implies, there is no «butter» in apple butter. The name comes from its smooth and buttery texture. Apple butter is delicious on buttered toast.

Don’t Throw Away Your Apple Cores!

Although apple butter takes time to make, the upfront part is easy. You do not have to peel or core the apples.

The pectin for firming up the resulting apple butter resides mostly in the cores and there is a lot of flavor in the apple peels. After the first cooking, these parts get discarded as the pulp is run through a food mill.

This recipe produces a traditional apple butter, which is both sweet and sour, the addition of cider vinegar just intensifying the flavor and giving it its tangy edge. It’s seasoned with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and lemon.

For more information on apple varieties, check out our Guide to Apples.

The Difference Between Applesauce and Apple Butter

Apple butter is a smoother, more concentrated form of applesauce. The methods for making the two both start out similarly, by slow-cooking apples until they’re soft and mushy. Applesauce will be ready at this saucy stage, sometimes with the addition of sugar and/or spices to flavor it. But to make apple butter, you puree the stewed apples and cook them down further so more liquid evaporates and the apples caramelize.

Alternatives to Stovetop Cooking

Don’t love standing at the stove stirring for ages? These two methods are way more hands-off.

• Microwave: Instead of cooking the seasoned puree on the stovetop in Step 5, cook it uncovered in a microwave, on medium heat setting to simmer, for around 30 minutes. If you do this, monitor the cooking every 5 or 10 minutes. Microwaves vary in their power.
• Slow cooker: In Step 5, transfer the seasoned puree to a slow cooker. Cook on low with the lid ajar (lay spoons across the cooker and set the lid on top) so steam can escape. Stir once every hour or so. Depending on your cooker, it could take up to 5 hours for the apple butter to cook down.

The Best Apples for Apple Butter

Look to softer apples, like Gravenstein, to make apple butter, as they will cook down faster. We also like the tart flavor of Granny Smith apples. Combine different apples to match your taste preferences. We recommend the following varieties:

• Braeburn
• Cortland
• Fuji
• McIntosh
• Golden Delicious
• Jonagold

Learn which apples are best to use in cooking and baking in our guide to apples.

Swaps and Suggestions for Homemade Apple Butter

• Switch up the spices. This recipe calls for cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and some lemon to bring out the flavor, but feel free to play around with others spices such as ginger and nutmeg if you wish.
• Switch up the sweetener. We recommend sticking with white sugar for a straightforward apple flavor. But readers have shared some of the swaps they’ve made in the comments. Check them out!

To Can or Not to Can?

Want to make larger batches of apple butter so you can have jars on hand for later and not worry about refrigerating them? Planning to give jars as gifts? If so, sterilize glass jars for canning. We offer detailed directions for water bath canning in the recipe below.

If you want to eat your apple butter up quickly, skip the canning. It keeps in the fridge for weeks as long as you’re not dipping dirty spoon into it. Or freeze it for later.

NOTE: For this recipe to be safe for canning, the sugar levels should not be reduced lower than to 1/3 cup sugar per 1 cup apple pulp.

Storing and Freezing Apple Butter

• Fresh apple butter will keep in the fridge for at least couple of weeks, if not longer.
• Sealed, canned jars of apple butter will keep for years in the pantry (they’re best used within a year, though). Once opened, they’ll also keep for weeks in the refrigerator.
• Frozen apple butter will keep up to a year.

Ways to Use Your Apple Butter

Whether you spread it on toast, swirl it into oatmeal, or serve it on a cheese plate, you’ll find a plethora of delicious ways to incorporate apple butter.

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What Is Apple Butter and How Do You Make It At Home?

Hint: There’s no butter involved.

There are few things cozier than toast or biscuits with apple butter on a chilly fall day. Nicole McLaughlin shows you what you need to know about everybody’s favorite autumnal fruit spread, including how to make it at home:

What Is Apple Butter?

Contrary to its name, there is no butter involved in the making of apple butter. The fruity spread, which is essentially highly concentrated applesauce, is made by cooking apples with spices (like cinnamon and cloves) or ciders until the sugars are caramelized. This process leaves you with a thick, brown, rich, and powerfully apple-flavored spread.

Apple Butter vs. Applesauce

Since apple butter is cooked much longer than applesauce, it has a totally different consistency. The extra time over the heat makes apple butter thicker and glossier than applesauce. While applesauce is soft and mushy, apple butter has a rich, spreadable texture that’s somewhere between jam and peanut butter.

Also, the sugars in apple butter are more concentrated than applesauce. This gives the spread a longer shelf life than the sauce.

Apple Butter Uses

Use apple butter the way you’d use any fruit spread: Spread it on toast or biscuits, dollop it onto pancakes or waffles, stir it into your oatmeal, or use it to give your baked goods a burst of fruitiness. You can even use apple butter in savory recipes — brush it onto meats (such as pork, chicken, or turkey) before cooking to add delicious fall flavor.

How to Make Apple Butter

If you’ve ever made applesauce, congratulations! You know exactly how to make apple butter: Just cook cored apples with sugar and warm spices like cinnamon and allspice. The only difference? Apple butter cooks longer to achieve its brown color, rich texture, and deep flavor.

It’s traditionally cooked on the stove, but you can also make apple butter with your slow cooker or Instant Pot. «I love Chef John’s recipe,» shares Nicole. «It’s super smooth and spreadable.»

Get Chef John’s Apple Butter Recipe here

For step-by-step instructions, learn How to Make Apple Butter 4 Easy Ways. Plus, check our Beginner’s Guide to Canning and Preserving for expert canning, food safety, and storage tips.

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