Michele and I visited Fair Oaks Farm in Indiana a couple of weeks ago on our drive from Chicago to Lousiville to attend the Louder Than Life Music Festival.
We always stop at the farm and love this place. It is about 100 miles from the airport and is the perfect pit stop place.
This is our second time going to the U-Pick apple orchard at the farm, and it is so much fun. They have acres and acres of different types of apples and you can get two sizes of bags for about ten bucks or so and fill them up with the kind you like.
I, of course, “sampled” several varieties to see if they were tasty and ripe. We picked four or five different kinds of apples as we walked through the rows and rows.
The hard part with anything on our trips is determining how we will get it home. We almost always go to Walmart or somewhere to buy an additional bag to check it on the plane.
Michele’s plan was to get these home to the Fort and make apple butter for the first time.
Ingredients
- 7 lbs apples
- 1 cup Blackened Whiskey
- 3 cups water
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1/2 cup brown sugar
- 1 TBSP cinnamon
- 1 TBSP vanilla
- 1 tsp nutmeg
- 1 tsp all spice
- 1/2 tsp cloves
- 3/4 tsp salt
Instructions
- Clean apples and chop into quarters, removing the stems and cutting away any bad spots.
- Place apples, bourbon, and water into a large stockpot.
- Bring to a boil over high heat.
- Once boiling, stir and drop heat to medium low and continue to simmer for 30 – 40 minutes. Apples should be fall apart soft when they are done.
- Using a blender place apples and liquid into blender in batches, carefully as it will be hot, place lid on and pulverize contents until smooth. (Ensure that you omitted seeds prior to boiling)
- Place the apple sauce into a slow cooker (it will be smooth)
- Stir in the maple syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, all spice, cloves, and salt.
- Place the lid on the slow cooker and set on low for 4 hours.
- After 4 hours, stir the apple butter. Replace the lid so that it is vented to allow steam to escape. It works well to rest it on chopsticks. Set the slow cooker on low for 3-4 hours.
