Remember a few weeks ago we went apple picking and brought home over a hundred pounds of apples? Last week we went back and picked another 60! We now have enough applesauce to have it with dinner twice a week from now until March, and fillings for 14 apple pies. We love pies, but I don’t love how labor intensive they are. So this year we decided to mass produce crusts and pie fillings. We prefer the taste and texture of a frozen pie filling to canned ones, so there’s no canning involved this time. Here’s my method for assembly-line style pie production!

For six, 9″ pies you will need:
25 lbs apples
3 cups brown sugar (or as few as two, or as many as four, depending on the tartness of your apples and how sweet you prefer your pies.)
1  1/4 cup flour
2 tbsp cinnamon
1/2 tbsp nutmeg
1/2 tbsp ginger
1/2 tbsp salt
3/4 cup melted butter
2 tbsp vanilla

Peel, core, and slice all your apples, reserving the peels and cores. (Your fingers will probably be wrinkly from the juices and your wrists achy from peeling.  Try and imagine the smell of warm apple pie to help get you through!)

In a medium bowl, combine sugar, flour, cinnamon, spices, and salt.

In a separate bowl (I just used the measuring cup the butter was melted in), add the vanilla to the melted butter.

In a large bowl, combine 8 cups sliced apples with 3/4 cups of the dry ingredient mixture, and toss well to coat all the apples.  Drizzle 2 tbsp of the butter mixture over the top, and stir gently.

Dump your apples into a gallon sized freezer bag, and repeat!

We also made ahead several pie crusts.  I use King Arthur Flour’s Butter Pie Crust Recipe, but instead of cutting in the butter in the traditional way I speed up the process by pulsing the ingredients in the blender.  In this way, I was able to make 6 pie crusts in about half an hour.

Between the crusts and the fillings, any time we feel like it this winter I should be able to have an apple pie in the oven in about 10 minutes, give or take!

Also this year, we were able to make our apple adventures truly no-waste. The peels and cores from sauce making went to the goats, but those from the pies were turned into…jelly! Essentially, you turn the scraps into cider, and the cider into jelly. We made this same recipe last year, and it’s easily my favorite out of all the types of fruit jams and preserves we make. Keep an eye out for the recipe next week!