Preserving Apples & Pears

Apple-pear Sauce

Just before Christmas, my mother gifted me with a box each of apples and pears. Shortly after Christmas day, youngest daughter and I got together to can apple-pear sauce. She was looking forward to having some prepped snack options for after baby's birth.

I was grateful I had an apple peeler-corer-slicer (see here for one similar to mine) as this made peeling and coring several pounds of apples SO much faster than peeling and slicing by hand. These handy instruments typically have two options: a suction cup stabilizer or a clamp stabilizer. I was initially skeptical of the suction cup model, but the year I went to buy one, that was the only model available that I could find to purchase in the area. All the stores I called were out -- except the local hardware store. They had one left that they graciously put on hold for me. I have used it several times and have been quite pleased with how well it grips the counter.

After preparing the apples and tossing them in the pot to cook, we peeled and sliced whichever pears had ripened and added them as well. After we were all finished with the canning process, we ended up with six and a half quarts of apple-pear sauce.


Canned apple-pear sauce

Frozen Pears

A week later, many of the pears left in the box had ripened. I didn't have time to can that week since I was working a lot, so our youngest son prepped and froze the pears that had ripened. He ended up freezing eight pints of pears and had enough left for a pear cobbler. Freezing pears is fairly easy since you only need to make a syrup and blanch them in the syrup before putting them in freezer containers.

Dried Apples and Pears

By the following week, the last of the pears had ripened. We had half a dozen apples left as well, and since the texture was a bit on the mealy side for our taste, we opted to dry them for snacks rather than eat them fresh.

We started by peeling and slicing the apples. (I didn't use the peeler-corer-slicer for this since there were only six apples.) We then put the slices in a bowl of water with lemon juice as we finished slicing them. (The acid in the juice helps to keep them from turning brown.) 

Soaking the apples in water and lemon juice

We then drained them well and arranged them on the dehydrator trays. After the apples were on the trays, we sliced the last few pears and filled the last tray with pears.

Arranging the apples on the dehydrator trays


We set the dehydrator at 135 degrees - the dehydrator's recommended setting for fruits. I was anticipating it to take  eight to twelve hours, but it only took about seven before everything was dried to our liking. 

During the summer months, I usually put the dehydrator in the laundry room or outside on the porch. Since it is winter and very cold outside, I put it in the dining room to take advantage of the extra heat it puts off. It helped warm the house and made it smell wonderful, too!

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