Name: Canning Apples for Food Storage
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 30 min
Total time: 60 min
Ingredients: 13 1/2 pounds baking apples; 6 1/2 cups water; 3/4 cup sugar

Canning apples is a great way to preserve the fresh flavor to enjoy throughout the year. Learn how to home can plain apples slices, quarters, or chunks for your food storage shelves.

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Although apples can be stored in a root cellar or cool location for a long time, having peeled, cored, and sliced apples ready to go can be a time saver in the kitchen. Canned apples can be enjoyed right out of the jar, or added to your favorite baked, simmered, or fried recipes.

Tips for Canning Apples

The best apples for canning are freshly harvested, local apples. Apples found out of season in the stores have been kept in storage, which affects the freshness, crispness, and juiciness.

Types of Apples for Canning

Choose crisp apple varieties that hold up well when cooked. Baking apples such as Braeburn, Cortland, Fuji, Honey gold, Gala, Granny Smith, Pink Lady, and Honeycrisp are good choices. Consider mixing several varieties for flavor.

Slightly damaged or softer apple varieties, such as Jonagolds, Macouns, McIntosh, Golden Delicious, and Red Delicious can be turned into canned applesauce.

Homemade Applesauce Canning Recipe

Select fresh, firm apples with no bruises or insect damage that have a strong apple aroma. If you are aiming for a full canner load, that would be about 17 1/2 pounds for a load of 7 quarts, and about 13 1/2 pounds for a canner load of 9 pint sized jars depending on the size of your apple pieces.

Decide on the Jar Size

Think about how you will use canned apples. I like canning apples in a mix of quarts and pints. You can fit about 3 pounds of apples into a quart-sized jar. That is just the right amount to make an apple pie and for most baked recipes, while the pints can be used for snacking.

The processing time is the same for pint and quart sized jars, so feel free to mix jar sizes in the same canner load.

Select a Preserving Liquid

Canning fruit in a sugar syrup helps to maintain flavor and shape. You can preserve apples in a sugar syrup, honey syrup, apple juice, white grape juice, or even plain water.

This recipe uses a very light sugar syrup, but feel free to substitute any of these options:

Syrup for 9 Pint Sized Jars:

Very Light: 6 1/2 cups water and 3/4 cups sugar
Light: 5 3/4 cups water and 1 1/2 cups sugar
Medium: 5 1/4 cups water and 2 1/4 cups sugar
Heavy: 5 cups water and 3 1/4 cups sugar
Light Honey: 7 cups water and 1/2 cups mild honey

Syrup for 7 Quart Sized Jars:

Very Light: 10 1/2 cups water and 1 1/4 cups sugar
Light: 9 cups water and 2 1/4 cups sugar
Medium: 8 1/4 cups sugar and 3 3/4 cups sugar
Heavy: 7 3/4 cups sugar and 5 1/4 cups sugar
Light Honey: 11 cups water and 1 cup honey

Steps to Canning Apples

In this canning recipe, apples are peeled, cored, cut into chunks, slices, quarters, or halves, and preserved into shelf stable jars using a water bath canner.

If you are new to canning or haven’t canned in a while, it may be helpful to review this article on water bath canning at the National Center for Home Food Preservation website.

A more detailed and printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this article, but these are the general steps for canning apples in pint-sized jars. See the notes in the recipe for quarts.

Step 1: Gather your canning supplies

You will need the following canning and kitchen equipment:

Water bath canner
9 pint sized canning jars
Canning lids and bands
Canning tools: lid lifter, jar lifter, canning ladle, funnel, and bubble popper
Plus basic kitchen supplies such as a large sauce pot, large prep bowl, small pot, kitchen towels, large slotted spoon, tongs, peeler, knife, and a cutting board.

Step 2: Prepare the canning jars

Wash the jars, lids, and canning equipment in hot, soapy water and rinse well. Check the jars for nicks and cracks. Eliminate any jars that are damaged as these will break in the canner.

Place the jar rack into water bath canner, set the jars on the rack in the canner, add water, and boil jars for 10 minutes to heat and sterilize. Warm your lids in a small pot over low heat. Keep jars and lids warm until ready to use.

Step 3: Make the syrup

Add the sugar and water to the large saucepan and bring to a boil over medium-high heat to dissolve sugar, keep warm.

Step 4: Prepare the Lemon Water

To help prevent the peeled apples from browning, dip the pieces in a lemon water bath or an ascorbic acid mixture, such as Fruit-Fresh (follow the instructions on the container).

For a lemon water bath, fill a large bowl with about a gallon of cold water and juice from one lemon or 1/2 cup of bottled lemon juice.

Step 5: Prepare the Apples

Wash the apples well under clean, running water. Peel, core, and cut into halves, quarters, chunks, or slices. Add the apple pieces to the prepared lemon bath as you work.

Step 6: Simmer the Apples in the Syrup

Drain the apples and add them to the sugar-syrup pot. Cover the pot, raise the heat, and bring it to a boil. Once it is boiling, reduce the heat and simmer the apples for about 5 minutes.

Partially cooking the apples in the syrup helps draw the air out of the fruit so it will be less likely to float in the jar or absorb extra liquid when processed.

Step 7: Can the Apples

Remove the warm jars from the canner, drain, and line up on a kitchen towel.

Use tongs and pack the hot apples into the jar. Use the canning funnel and ladle to pour the hot syrup over the apples maintaining a 1/2-inch headspace. To help prevent siphoning, make sure that the apples are covered with the liquid while allowing for adequate headspace.

Run the bubble popper through the jars to remove air bubbles. Add the lids and process in a water bath canner. Let the jars cool, test the seals, label and date the jars, and store in a cool, dark location. Canned foods are best if eaten within a year and are safe as long as lids remain sealed.

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