Food Mill Makes Easy Work of Applesauce
Dear Corduroy Orange:
I really enjoy fresh applesauce but I hate the effort of peeling and coring all of those apples. Is there any way I can avoid that?
Peter Rambo
Dear Mr. Rambo—
There sure is, though unfortunately, you didn’t ask me early enough in the season for you to take advantage of the technique with your namesake apple, which is tart enough to make a tasty sauce.
The secret to making effortless applesauce lies in having a food mill for your kitchen. It’s a handy device that allows you to press the cooked down apples through a sturdy stainless steel sieve. The “saucy” part makes it through the holes; the seeds, skin, and pulp stay behind. The result: smooth and tasty homemade applesauce without having had to peel a thing.
Food mills come in a couple of different styles. Mine, which is the more uncommon style, is a large, conical device that fits into a tripod and has a wooden plunger specifically designed to fit inside of it. I roll the plunger around the pulp to mash it through. The more common design looks more like a sucepan that’s been attacked with a hole puncher and fitted with a crank; it sits atop a large bowl or a sucepan. Simply turn the crank to mash food through it.
To make applesauce, simply quarter enough apples to fill your largest pot. Add an inch and a half of water or so to the bottom of the pot, throw in a couple of whole cinnamon sticks, several whole allspice, and half as many whole cloves. Set over low heat and let stew several hours, stirring occasionally. When the apples have cooked down to the point that they’re quite soft (and very fragrant! There are few smells more pleasant than that of applesauce being cooked), run them through the food mill. Enjoy some of the resulting sauce immediately; freeze the rest to save it for a hot, tasty treat throughout the winter.
In addition to helping make great applesauce, a food mill will assist you in making tasty tomato soup without peeling the tomatoes (though I would recommend squeezing out the seeds), making incredibly smooth mashed potatoes (if you go for that sort of thing; personally, I don’t mind a few lumps because they assure me that I’m eating real potatoes, not rehydrated modified potato starch), and baby food (though for such a small creature, you might actually want to buy a smaller model intended specifically for making baby food, because the big ones seem a bit large for making such small portions).
Have a question related (even tangentially) to the world of food? Email me, and I’ll try to respond in a future post.
November 14th, 2006 at 10:09 pm
I’ve hunted for a yeast and fresh cinnamony apple bread the likes of which the family indulged in in North Carolina some 12+ years ago. Any chance you have some recommendations on how to recreate the delicacy?
November 19th, 2006 at 8:35 am
Those are very interesting techniques for making applesauce and tomato soup. I think I might try them sometime! Do you have a favorite tomato soup recipe that I might be able to try?
I have used both types of food mills and the conical type is definitely the best by far. If anyone is looking to purchase one, they should check out kitchen supply sources until they find a conical one. The flat type has larger holes and the unmashed food tends to spill out easily and get into the finished product.
Mom
December 22nd, 2006 at 11:44 am
[...] Including instructions on preparing a pincage The surprising thing about classically prepared tomato sauce is that it’s made with a roux. The venerable Auguste Escoffier (the generally accepted authority on classical French cooking with whom it’s impossible to argue because he’s dead) directs that a gallon of tomato sauce be started with 5 ounces of salt pork. Once the fat is rendered from the salt pork, he would have you cook 6 ounces each of small diced carrot and onion in the fat, then add 5 ounces of flour to finish the roux before adding a bay leaf, salt, pepper, sugar, ten pounds of tomatoes and a half gallon of stock. His variation on the recipe would permit you to use tomato puree instead of tomatoes, in which case (because the puree is thick enough on its own), you would not need to make the roux. In either case, the sauce is finished by straining it through a sieve for uniform consistency, and always contains the salt pork (for apparently a classical French tomato sauce requires the presence of meat). I doubt many people really follow his tomato sauce instructions anymore unless they’re doing so for the purpose of cooking like Escoffier. There are many ways to make a tomato sauce and all of them are good. The basics of it are quite simple: cook tomatoes down to mush with spices and seasonings; if you’ve included the peel of the tomato, it’s best form to strain it out (as with a food mill). What you do from there is up to you. [...]