What Are Apples and How Can I Use Them?

Applesauce is cooked, pureed apple, nothing more required than fruit and heat. It runs from silky and pale to chunky and brown depending on the apples you use and how hard you cook them.

It plays a few roles at once. It is a spoonable side and a snack toddlers will actually eat, but in a working kitchen its real job is baking.

The unsweetened version is the workhorse. It carries clean apple flavor without added sugar, which is exactly what you want when you cook with it rather than eat it straight. Sweetened, cinnamon-spiced jars are for the bowl, not the mixing bowl.

Tart apples like Granny Smith cook down into a brighter, more apple-forward sauce, while Fuji or Honeycrisp give you something milder and sweeter. Most homemade batches mix both.

Apple juice is the strained, filtered juice pressed from apples. It is clear and pale gold, with a clean sweet-tart flavor and not much body.

It carries a high natural sugar load, and many store-bought brands add more on top.

In cooking it earns its place less as a drink and more as a workhorse liquid. It adds gentle sweetness and a faint fruit note wherever you might otherwise reach for water or stock.

Granny Smith apples are medium in size with a bright green and waxy skin.  The flesh is firm, juicy, acidic (tart), and crisp.  This is one of the most ideal apples for baking recipes as the slice hold their shape very well, and it is not overly sweet.

The fruit of the apple tree is one of the most widely cultivated fruit-bearing trees in the world.

The apple originated in Asia Minor and grew wild in Europe by prehistoric times.  Cold storage with carbon dioxide ensures a year-round supply. The American red delicious accounts for over 1/2 of the apple trade.

The apple is the most popular fruit in the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, and France.

"As American as apple pie" is a testament to the dedication of the US to the first fruit planted in the United States.  It was carried to the US West by the legendary Johnny Appleseed (1854).

Apples are best as a dessert fruit from October to April. They should be firm, without blemishes or wrinkles.

## Preservation

Ripe apples can be stored in a ventilated room stalk side down when picked.   Apples can also be sliced into rings and dried. Cooked apples also freeze well and can be turned into jellies and jam preserves such as the American Apple Butter.

In the US, apple cider means fresh-pressed apple juice that has been left cloudy and unfiltered. It is usually unpasteurized when you buy it straight from an orchard, pressed from a blend of apples, often heritage varieties.

That blend, and the cloudiness, are the whole point. The pulp and fine sediment that filtered apple juice strips out are what give cider its body and round mouthfeel. They also make it taste tarter and more complex than the clear stuff in a juice box.

Apple juice, by contrast, is the same fruit clarified and usually sweetened to a consistent flavor. Cider always tastes more like the apple it came from.

Cider is a fall product. Mills press it when apples come off the trees, and the best jugs show up at farm stands from September through the holidays, then disappear by winter.

American usage also splits on alcohol. Plain cider is "sweet cider" and is nonalcoholic, while "hard cider" has been fermented into an alcoholic drink. This page is about the sweet kind.

Apple juice concentrate is apple juice with most of the water boiled off, then frozen. A small can holds the sugar and flavor of several times its volume in juice, which is why it freezes into a thick, sticky, intensely sweet slush.

Most cooks know it as the frozen tube in the supermarket freezer, sold for diluting back into a pitcher of juice. In the kitchen it earns a second life as a natural sweetener that also doubles as a glaze base and a marinade backbone.

Because it is just reduced apple juice, it carries real apple flavor and fruit sugar without the refined taste of white sugar. That makes it a favorite in recipes aiming for a softer, fruitier sweetness.

Dried apple slices are fresh apples sliced thin and dehydrated until most of their water is gone. What is left is chewy and sweet, with the apple flavor concentrated by everything that evaporated.

Drying is one of the oldest ways to keep an apple harvest through winter. Old recipes call the rings schnitz, and whole regional dishes were built around the dried fruit when fresh apples were long gone.

You will find them two ways. There are leathery soft slices meant for cooking and snacking, and crisp freeze-dried or oven-crisped chips that shatter like a cracker. They behave very differently in the kitchen.

The McIntosh is a soft, tender apple with thin red-and-green skin and bright white flesh. Bite into one and it is juicy and a little tart, with a sweet, almost wine-like perfume that gives the fruit its fans.

It is one of the oldest North American varieties, discovered in Ontario around 1811 and still a fixture of the fall harvest across Canada and the northern United States. The famous computer was named after it.

What sets a Mac apart in the kitchen is texture. The flesh is loose and breaks down fast under heat, so it collapses into a soft puree where a firmer apple would stay in neat chunks.