Hope. Despair. Ecstasy!

Free is a very good price.  Usually.  These apples were free, and I thought they would make a decent sauce.  I hoped they would.

Ugly, crushed, green--we put two full buckets
in the compost from the first five we gathered.

The tree belongs to my sister's neighbor.  It's an ancient old dame, spreading like a million giant broken spiders across the sky and shading hundreds of square feet of the earth. This year it was fecund and abundant beyond anything in past memory. Never sprayed, the tree's fruit began the thinning process early.  Small, medium and large apples dappled the ground and rolled down the street to become early sauce under the passing cars.  While picking up a few from the pavement yet uncrushed, I wiped one clean and took a bite.  H-m-mmm. Might be OK.

Cooking up the cut-off apples until they just start to
fall apart.

Five-gallon buckets were filled, carted home, and the process began.  Three quarters is the most you get with a "wind-fall."  The rest of the apple is brown moosh.  It takes time to cut off the salvageable part:  the price of free. There is some satisfaction in the making good out of something that otherwise would be compost.  Holding that glimmer as I cut was the most important of Things I get to do today.

The skins were green making the sauce much darker
than I considered "pretty."

Part way through the process, I took a lick of the still warm sauce.  Ugh.  It seemed tasteless and sour.  All this effort for something we may not even want to eat!  Before I continued, I thought a true test would be only fair. A bowel of sauce, a goodly amount of sugar (how much, you ask?  Until you feel guilty is my husband's response), and a spoon later and suddenly my whole being was alert and alive!  Could it be?  Could this unknown, ugly-at-its-best, free apple make sauce that tasted so good it nearly rivaled the yellow transparent sauce raved about in a previous post?

Used a 24-quart cooler to hold the sauce before stirring in
the sugar.  

Many buckets and boxes of apples later (these from the tree without the brown moosh stamped into the side), hours in the kitchen with my sister gamely cranking the sauce machine, friendly family chatter in abundance, and we were the richer by 62 quarts of superb sauce. Ecstasy!

Yellow Transparents

It was the call I was waiting for.  Several blocks from our house stands a lovely, old, farm-style house.  In the yard an ancient Yellow Transparent Apple tree spreads it twisted branches.  I cruise local neighborhoods looking for that kind of tree.  "May I buy some of your apples?" is the line I use.  Most folks go from blank to grateful at the prospect of unloading worthless apples that become wasp attractors within a few days of falling off the tree.  The apples announce their ripeness by dropping to the ground.  Brooke was phoning to say the apples were ripe.  Come get them off the ground.  Today.  Please!

Enough Yellow Transparents to make more than a gallon of sauce

I've loved these apples all my life, not for eating from the tree, but for the delicious sauce they make, thick, tart and smooth as velvet.  My grandmother had an old tree that yielded dozens of quarts of sauce every summer.  They are ready to cook up right after the raspberries are finished.

Victorio Strainer:  a sauce makers dream
Cooked fruit goes in the top
Peelings come out the spout on the left
Sauce pours into the dish

A brief search told me that the tree is from very old Russian stalk, is exceptionally cold hardy, and tends to take every other year off to rest.  Someone's blog said they were worthless and in their area were called "throwing apples" since those folks believed the only thing they were good for was throwing at dogs and cats (that tells you more than you want to know about the whole mentality of the area).

Finished sauce, hot and ready for sugar

In our family, these apples are gold.  We love this sauce more than any other fruit sauce, so after gathering the apples at Brooke's, the next of the Things I get to do today is assemble my Victorio Strainer and make The Best apple sauce in the world.