Pull Out The Potato Masher For An Elevated Applesauce Experience

Applesauce can sometimes get a bad rap. Some would prefer to leave applesauce back in the days of school lunches or consider it just mushy baby food. But when we brush off applesauce as such, or only think of it as a dipping sauce for eating the occasional pork chop, we forget the potential of what applesauce is at its core: Fresh, delicious apples transformed into a sweet and tart sauce. We love apples in desserts like apple pie or strudel — and now it's time to love applesauce.

One way to take your applesauce from a creamy mush to an elevated textural experience is to bust out your handy potato masher. Just as the potato masher is usually used to create a thicker, chunkier mashed potato dish, so it shall be used for your next applesauce. With a potato masher, you're in control of just how chunky or smooth you'd like your applesauce to be. And when you get little chunks of apple in every bite, you're reminded of the original great flavors of the apples you started with before adding in the extra sugar and seasonings.

Before you even begin to think about the texture of your homemade applesauce, you'll want to choose your apples wisely. Look for a selection of apples that vary in taste, as a mixture of sweet and tart apples will help create a great balance of flavor in your sauce. Once you wash, peel, and remove the core from the apples, you're ready to dice them up and cook them down on the stove. Here's where you add a bit of water and some spices into the pot of apples — cinnamon being an applesauce fan favorite. Boil the apple mix until it's very soft, then let it cool before mashing.

Use the potato masher just like you would when mashing potatoes: Firmly grip the handle and rock the masher back and forth over the cooked apples, breaking them down into a chunky sauce. You could create a similar texture here using a fork, but a potato masher is far more user-friendly and will allow you to cover more surface area of the cooked apples when mashing. Keep mashing until you feel the applesauce has a texture you like.

There are two types of potato mashers most frequently used, slightly different in shape. You have a squiggly, single-wire, rectangular-shaped masher made of metal and a round metal masher with holes. The round masher with holes is good for smashing smaller pieces of your apples through. The small holes can also make this masher harder to clean. The single-wire masher, on the other hand, can work around the edges and cover more space, depending on the size of your masher, of course.

Both mashers will do the job of creating an applesauce with varying textures, leaving some chunks behind. Since your diced apples will be smaller than potatoes, keep in mind that you may not need as large of a masher as usual. But no matter what potato masher you use for your applesauce, you're sure to realize what a versatile utensil the potato masher is — it can even handle ground meat. Enjoy your chunkier, homemade applesauce and say goodbye to boring applesauce mush for good.