If you’ve ever bitten into a raw crabapple, you may have found the texture mealy and a little off-putting. Smaller fruit (less than an inch in diameter) often has a grainy texture, but because cooking gets rid of the textural issue, you can use any size fruit in this crabapple sauce recipe.
Be sure to taste a fruit before you harvest a boatload from a single tree. Flavor varies from almost sweet to crazy sour, and underripe crabapples can be unpleasantly astringent. If you’re lucky enough to find bright red fruit, the color will carry over into the sauce, making it especially nice.
What You’ll Need to Make Crabapple Sauce
- 8 cups of crabapples
- water
- 1 cup (or more) sugar
What to Do to Make Crabapple Sauce
I’ve seen recipes that say to quarter each crabapple and remove both ends of the fruit. I can’t imagine why anyone would do all this extra work. Simply wash the fruit and cut out any obviously bad spots.
Note: I make crabapple sauce in a crockpot because it’s so easy! I love starting a batch in the morning before work, then coming home to a crabapple-scented kitchen. You can also make this recipe in a pot on the stove, but it requires a little more attention. You may also need more water with the stovetop method.
In a crockpot, combine eight cups of crabapples with one cup of water,and turn it on low. Check back in 4-8 hours.
To make this on the stove, combine the water and crabapples in a large pot and bring to a boil. Cover, and reduce the heat to maintain a low simmer. Let it simmer for 30 to 60 minutes, checking regularly and adding more water if necessary. Cook until the crabapples are very soft.
Once the fruit has thoroughly softened, remove it from the heat (either crockpot or stove) and let it cool slightly. Run the crabapples through a food mill to remove the seeds and stems. If the resulting sauce is chunkier than you like, run it through your food mill one more time. If you don’t have a food mill, use a potato masher to mash the fruit, then pass the pulp through a strainer to catch the seeds and stems. (Then go buy yourself a food mill because it’s a great labor-saving device which you will use often!)
Transfer the sauce to a skillet and taste. It will be MUCH more sour than regular applesauce. Add a cup of sugar and stir it into the applesauce over low heat, then taste again. How you plan to use your applesauce will determine how sweet you’ll make it. To serve with sausage, porkchops, or sauerbraten, you may want to stop here. If you’re going to serve it as dessert, or to kids as an after school snack, increase the sugar in quarter cup increments until you reach the desired sweetness level.
Once you have your basic crabapple sauce, you can experiment with spicing. Try a batch with chile pequins, or ground spicebush berries and wild ginger.
Crabapple sauce will keep for a week in the refrigerator, or, process jars in a boiling water bath for long term storage. Use it as a base for ice cream or cake or enjoy it all on its own.
I tried this recipe.becsusr I like to use apple sauce in my dad’s carrot cake recipe.it makes the cake so moist. Thank you for sharing your recipe. Turned out great
Thanks Brenda, I’m glad you liked it.
Hello Ellen – I love your website and I hope you are still monitoring these posts as it’s now almost 5 years after you posted this recipe! My neighbor has a crabapple tree whose branches lean over our driveway and fill our driveway with crabapples each fall. This year, instead of complaining about the mess they make after being squashed by the cars, I decided to try and do something productive with them, and found this recipe. I am not into canning/preserving (yet), so I wanted something I could do very simply. This fit the bill – so I bought a food mill, cooked the crabapples (almost filled up a 7-quart crockpot), and ran them through the mill on the smallest hole insert, so I have a pretty large container full of what came out of the mill and it looks lovely. We put several batches through the mill and scraped the residue (seeds, skins, pulp and stems) out each time. My 5yo son helped me and is super excited about trying the sauce. I haven’t sugared the sauce yet but here is my concern/question – I just read a few articles that warn against eating crabapple seeds as they contain a chemical (as do regular apple seeds and other fruit pits) that breaks down into cyanide in your gut and can be dangerous to consume and even fatal if in enough concentration – likely the reason for other recipes telling you to core the apples first. Most of the time the advice in these articles is not to worry, because a lot of times the assumption is that you or your child might accidentally have consumed a whole seed while eating an apple or crabapple, and supposedly they have a tough outer coating and go right through your system, so therefore you would be fine. However, I think that the food mill was abrasive enough that it did grind up some seed, so there are likely pieces of ground seed in my sauce, so whatever amount of this chemical the seeds contained has now been unleashed and is distributed throughout the sauce. I know you would have to ingest a lot of seed for it to cause harm, but my son is not a big kid, and I am now slightly afraid to eat it, let alone serve it to him. I was thinking I should maybe run the sauce through a fine mesh sieve or cheesecloth, but if the seeds are ground up finely enough, not even sure if that would help. I’d love some thoughts or advice on this. Thanks!
Kudos to you for taking the productive approach! I understand your concern, and I’m happy to share my take on this. But please note that I am neither a doctor, a nutritionist, nor a chemist, and my opinions are entirely my own. You will have to make your own, well-considered, responsible decision for yourself and your child. My understanding is that the cyanide in apple (and other) seeds is not heat stable, and that cooking it makes it safe to consume the occasional seed. But I don’t know how many seeds made it into your sauce or how much your son weighs. If you’re convinced that a good quantity of seeds made it through your food mill, you’ll probably rest easier if no one eats it. I’m sorry not to have better news. I can tell you that as a full grown adult, I’ve never had any issues, but I’ve also never noticed that my food mill crushed the seeds. Best wishes.
Can you tell me how I can get crabapples or is there a good substitute to make the sauce for the cake? Thank you.
Crabapples aren’t generally something you can buy, but this recipe will also work with very tart regular apples. If you’d like to forage for crabapples, you can do that in the fall, or if you’re in the southern hemisphere, you should be able to find them in a few months.