I love apple season. So sweet, so tart, so firm. A good crunchy apple is a very satisfying thing.
This year I got a couple of bushels of apples from Freedom Country Store [highway 231 just north of Worthington, Indiana]. One bushel was jonathans, one was zestars.
Zestars are fabulous! Those went into sauce. Delicious sauce! I will warn you that when you're pressing the sauce, it oxidizes and goes gray. Don't worry. When we processed the jars of gray goo, it magically turned back into a beautiful pale pink sauce.
The bushel of Jonathans went to pie filling. I used this method this year from the National Center for Home Food Preservation and am happy to report that it was easy and produced fabulous pies.
[NCHFP is a site full of information, but crappy in organization. The search feature is not obvious. Look on the left sidebar of their site. The third thing down is the SEARCH. It takes a sec to pull up.]
I used Perma Flo instead of the product they recommend, because I can't get what they recommend. The Perma Flo is easy to use, comes in a bulk package and lasts. I'm so happy that it stores decently through our damp springs/falls and hot summers. I used the rest of the stuff I got last year and had zero problems. I used every last drop of it to make as much pie filling as I could.
The only problem was that I had more apples. Hmmmm. What to do with them.....
