Applesauce

We were blessed this past week to have a surplus of apples. Usually apples are on my list of “definitely must have organic”, (we usually bought everything organic) but because of the scarcity of fruit in general here, plus the even bigger scarcity of organic food (we would have to order specially from Hobart), I gladly accept the poisoned apple.

Back in Canada, we preferred to have Granny Smith apples (or sour apples as the kids referred to them as) because they do not have as high a sugar content. We would generously (at least I would) load them with cinnamon and eat with our freshly ground (with my Champion Juicer) raw almond butter. However, I have had to leave my wonderful juicer in care of my Mom, who I'm sure will thoroughly enjoy it. Plus we don't have any almonds currently. Apparently they do get them occasionally here though.

The apples that's we've gotten here have been a various varieties. Golden Delicious, and Fuji among others that I can't remember. They have done alright with the natural peanut butter, but just don't have the flavour of the organic apples. It will be truly wonderful when the apple trees bring forth their fruit here. I am not sure how many apple trees they have, but I know they have at least one more established one, and several smaller ones. Those will be good apples.

The apple is a great fruit. It is also a great sweetener. So I set about to make some applesauce to use later for baking when apples are not so plentiful. I choose the Golden Delicious for the sauce, mainly because I know the other people here preferred the red ones for eating.

I do cringe at the thought of eating apples full of poisonous pesticides, or anything with pesticides for that matter. Apples happen to be at the top of the list for pesticides (along with bell peppers, and peaches). Among a host of other nasty things, pesticides are also mimic estrogen. For someone who has a disease caused by too much estrogen, this is definitely something that I want to avoid. So what to do?

Before leaving Canada, I got a very interesting book from Letitia about Charcoal called Charcoal Remedies.com. At the time, my interest was the part of the book that talked about charcoal's ability to absorb poisons from snake and spider bites. (I have never seen so many spiders as I do here, not a fan of spiders in the first place, but here there is the added, “Just assume they are all poisonous to some degree.” Great.) However, reading the book, I am soundly convinced of charcoal's diversity and have been trying it out several different ways – ways not even mentioned in the book (although I'm not totally done reading it yet), but the principle is the same. Charcoal absorbs poison, and I was particularly intrigued by one story of a man who attempted suicide by swallowing a bunch of pesticides. They force fed him a bunch of charcoal water (he was unconscious) and he made it.

And so I took my charcoal to the kitchen. Well actually it stays in there anyway. I've been filtering water using charcoal, but that's another story.

So, when I cut up my apples to make the sauce I simply added a tablespoon of powdered charcoal to the pot. It took eight apples to fill the pot and the one tablespoon sure made them black. I simmered the apples on as low as I could on this stove (it doesn't stay very low). Normally I would just juice the whole apple with the blank screen on my juicer for nice raw applesauce, but alas, I don't have that option anymore.


I let them cook until nice and soft and then mashed them as good as I could, but wasn't terribly picky.
I then packed them into little jar containers, measured by the cup for use in future baking.


I did a second batch and decided that maybe I didn't want such a black applesauce. So instead of adding the charcoal to the pot, I sprinkle the tablespoon of charcoal to the cut apples in a bowl and let them sit for a while.


After sitting for a few hours, I quickly rinsed them.

I still had the scrapings of the first batch of applesauce in the pot, so this second batch is darker than it would've been if I had done them this second method from the start, but that's okay. No one will mistake my applesauce! Can you tell which was the first batch?


During this process I did notice something very interesting. I let the second batch of apples sit for a couple of hours in the charcoal. Normally apples turn yellow/brown after a while. However, these apples remains a nice white (with black specks from the charcoal). That led me to another idea...