there’s something about a chilly saturday afternoon that just makes you want to stay inside and bake all day. last november i tackled cooking and canning apple butter for the first time and i’m proud to say the butter i made last year actually preserved correctly and is just as delicious this year. but since i’m running low, i decided it was time to make a fresh batch. i’ll run through the steps as we go through the pictures and i’ve included the fully detailed recipe at the end of the post. there’s nothing like warm biscuits and apple butter on a lazy sunday morning.

you’re going to get yourself a whole bunch of good cooking apples. i happened to have a ton left over from apple picking, but otherwise i would go with a good bunch of granny smith (my favorite). the best part of this recipe is that you don’t have to peel or core these apples (unless you don’t have a way to strain them out later). you’re just going to cut them up into quarters and empty them into a wide shallow pan filled with a bit of water and apple cider vinegar.

pile the apples in your pan (i used my dutch oven) and bring the liquid to a boil. cook for another 20 minutes or so, stirring occasionally, and you’ll break down the apples completely.

this is what you end up with. it may look ugly but it smells incredible.

from there, the apples take a trip into your food mill, which is an amazingly simple hand powered strainer. i just got mine for my birthday a few weeks ago (thanks mom!) and i’m already on the lookout for more recipes that use it. give yourself a workout straining out the cores, seeds and peels, add a bit of sugar and cinnamon to the apple puree, and you’ve got…

…applesauce! if all you wanted was applesauce, stop now. eat! if you dare to make apple butter, press on, putting the applesauce back on high heat for a few hours. keep a close eye on the apple butter and stir it constantly so it doesn’t burn on the bottom and develop a crust.

the apple butter goes a little crazy on high heat. like, bubbly, deadly crazy. i burned myself several times and covered the kitchen in hot apple puree. of course, i was cooking without a shirt on (it got REALLY hot in the kitchen) so i only have myself to blame for singed chest hair. your inclination might be to cover the pot, but leaving the pot uncovered actually helps the apple butter thicken more quickly because you can promote evaporation by stirring constantly, and at the same time moisture isn’t building up on the pot lid and dripping right back in.

canning apple butter is not as scary as it sounds, but i didn’t capture any pictures of it because i was concentrating on not burning myself (any more) while sterilizing the jars and then sealing the filled jars in boiling water. there are full directions for canning below.

after the apple butter is all finished, the biscuits are a breeze. the recipe comes from alton brown, who, for whatever reason, was the first person that came to mind when i thought of biscuits. rest assured, it uses plenty of buttermilk.

you can store and reheat the biscuits over the following week if for whatever reason you can’t devour a dozen at a time (you wimp). slather the apple butter on anything and everything. it’s good hot and cold, and a big ‘ole jar makes a really good gift for the holidays.

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all i’m going to say about this recipe is that after making it, i decided that i am never going to the grocery store for bread ever again. let’s not ruin this with any more words - just enjoy.

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the girl recently surprised me with a copy of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, a book that aims to simplify the process of making fancy high-quality bread. i definitely recommend it, even if i had trouble believing that the authors could pull off the concept before tasting it myself. the basic idea is that you can make bake great bread that tastes like you spent much more time on it than you really did - no starters or kneading necessary. that’s right, no kneading.

with most of the recipes in the book, an overly wet dough is quickly mixed together and allowed to rise in the bowl straight away. it is then quickly shaped into loaves after a few hours of rising. for those few seconds that the dough was actually in my hands for shaping, i was tempted to start working it on the counter to get a consistency i was more comfortable with, but the whole point is to let the ingredients do their job.

restraint definitely pays off with these recipes. i know mark bittman’s no-knead bread was all the rage, but the rising time for the original recipe is 12-18 hours. this peasant bread rose for 2 hours, and then another 40 minutes after it was shaped and as the oven warmed up. the crust and crumb were delicious, and as the smell of this bread filled the apartment, it made me want to grab a loaf and have a picnic in the park with a block of cheese and a cheap bottle of wine.

since my kitchen is about 40 degrees most mornings, there’s only more incentive this season to fire up the oven and bake a fresh loaf of bread every day or two. join me, won’t you?

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even though we ate it a lot growing up, at some point i stopped buying white bread and moved completely to whole wheat. today, white bread is frowned upon by many because of its perceived lack of health benefits, but for me, the change to whole wheat was for taste alone. whole wheat has a more rounded and nutty flavor, and it’s come to replace and enhance things like grilled cheeses and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. this was my first experience using whole wheat flour, and i was pleasantly surprised at how easily this bread came together.

this bread has both a soaker and a poolish. a soaker is a pre-ferment, which means it helps the bread taste like the dough fermented for much longer than it actually did. the soaker does not have yeast in it; the purpose is to help soften the coarse whole wheat grain and also activate the enzymes in the grains to break out some of the trapped sugars from the starches.

the poolish is another type of pre-ferment that is made up of flour, water and yeast. there is yeast in a poolish (very little), but it goes a long way in a very wet flour/water mixture (it’s easier for the yeast to work it’s magic in this state). when the poolish is added to the dough before baking, it not only helps fermentation but also adds incredible flavor.

the trick with whole wheat breads is making sure the flavor is hearty and delicious and not bitter and grassy. increasing the fermentation time helps balance the flavors, and for this reason, you’ll often find pre-ferments in these types of recipes. and while the amount of steps in a recipe like this can look intimidating, it’s really much simpler than it seems. at it’s core, bread has always been just flour, yeast, water and (often) salt.

i decided to test out my bread on an overstuffed grilled cheese with bacon, tomatoes and red onion. needless to say, it passed with flying colors.

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