Great Grandma's Candied Apples

This update is particularly exciting. Over Christmas I learned from my great aunt that great grandma Fyfe used to make apples two ways: candied and as applesauce. One was for eating at breakfast and the other was not to be eaten at breakfast, though nobody could remember which was which. I recently opened my mail to find a recipe card, hand written by great grandma Fyfe who knows how long ago, describing her candied apples technique.



As well as I can tell, here is what it says:

1½ C Water
1 C Sugar

Bring to boil then drop in quartered apples. Cover and cook slowly until they look tender - about 30 min. Remove top and place in preheated oven 350º for approximately 30 min longer or until pink and most of juice absorbed in apples. Pour into bowl immediately then cover with waxed paper, left free. Chill.

Thanks Heidi for help with some of the trickier words!



It also included a note from my great aunt saying that firm tart apples are best.

My apples are pretty small. The recipe doesn't specify but I eyeball that I should use four. It's about as many as I can fit in the pan before I run out of water. The recipe also doesn't specify whether or not to peel the apples. I elect not to, as the changing color of the skin given me some indication of how the cooking is going (and, since apples float, which parts need to be rotated under the water).



Now as you may notice my apples are not so much tender as disintegrated after their time on the stove, even though I took them off after 20 minutes rather than 30. And after half an hour in the oven it was pretty clear that they weren't going to turn pink and soak up all the remaining liquid. So this didn't pan out.

The first bright side is that it's still tasty. It's pretty much like a sweet applesauce. The second bright side is that I only used about a third of my apples (I was planning a big applesauce batch, appropriately enough). I'm going to try this again. I think I know what went wrong.

I ended up with way too much fluid at the end. I had fit as many apples into that sugar water as I could but I think that pan was exactly the wrong shape. With a narrower pan I could push in a bunch of apples and many would be forced below the surface of the water. With a very wide pan I would have been able to arrange the apples in a single layer. I think either of those would have allowed me to use more apples for the same amount of water. I'm inclined to try the wide pan next.

I think I also did not cook the apples slowly enough. I had the water barely boiling, but I think perhaps I should have let it lapse to less than a boil. That will allow the tenderness to get to the center of the apple before the outside becomes mush.

Stay tuned for the next chapter in this adventure.