Homemade Fruit Sauce

Homemade fruit sauce…  One of my go-to snack options for the kiddos!  You’ll often find my freezer PILED high with little pots of it and for good reason.  It’s super easy to make, it keeps well, it defrosts quickly, and it’s a healthful addition to lunches and snacks. Low on fresh fruits and veggies?  Pull out some fruit sauce! Produce on its last legs?  Turn it into fruit sauce!

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You can make fruit sauce with all kinds of different fruits, but apples and pears are my go-to ‘base’ fruits.  Both are grown right here in the Okanagan and since both store pretty well, I can pretty much find locally grown varieties year round.  That and when cooked and blended, they both have a good texture for fruit sauce.  I add all kinds of other things to our fruit sauces, but I almost always start with apples and / or pears first.

I get so many questions about how to make fruit sauce at home and it really couldn’t be easier…  No recipe required!

Here’s what we do…  First,  wash all of our apples and pears.  Sometimes I soak them in a water and vinegar solution for a few minutes beforehand and sometimes I don’t, but I always run them under clean water and kind of rub them to help remove any residue that might be on them.

Once your apples and pears are clean, you’re ready to make your fruit sauce!  I like to make big batches, but it doesn’t really matter how many apples and pears you have…  Just use what you have on hand.

Okay, onto the pot…  I really like using a thick-bottom pot like my Lodge cast iron dutch oven for fruit sauce because it means I can basically forget about it for an hour, but if you don’t have one – no worries.  You’ll just maybe want to check in on your fruit now and then to make sure it doesn’t burn / stick to the bottom.

Alright, here it is… Remove the cores from all of your apples and pears, toss the fruit into your pot, add a tiny bit of water (for this giant pot full of fruit I add 1/4 cup of water – for a smaller pot I might only add a tablespoon or two), cover it, and turn your element onto the very lowest setting.  Every stove is slightly different of course so you’ll definitely want to be more attentive on your first go, but we leave a big pot of fruit covered on low without touching it for about 45 minutes to an hour usually.  A smaller pot of fruit will need less time of course.

When we come back at the 45 minute / hour mark, the fruit is soft all the way through.  You basically want to be able to mash it with a fork and have it fall apart on you.

After our fruit has had a chance to cool, we transfer it, along with any liquid it’s produced, into our Vitamix blender and process it using the smoothie setting (50 seconds).

If your blender is having a hard time at any point, feel free to add little bits of water at a time to help it out.  The goal is to have it turn out completely smooth, so don’t be afraid to run it for more than 45 seconds if needed either.

When you’re done, you should have a perfectly smooth fruit sauce that can be transferred into mini mason jars and put into the fridge or freezer for storage.  (Just be sure to leave some space at the top of the jar if you plan on freezing yours.)

Plain apple and / or pear sauce is absolutely delicious all on its own, but we often mix in other fruits and veggies too!  Grae and Sam love the different flavours and it’s a nice way to switch things up too.  If we have fresh fruit outside of apples and pears that need to be used up, we’ll use that, but our go-to add-ins are largely frozen fruit (strawberries, mango, blueberries, or mixed berries) or fresh spinach.

When using almost any add-in, fresh or frozen, we add it to the pot of apples and pears and cook everything together.  The one exception?  Spinach.  (Or other greens – I think kale would probably work great too.)  With spinach, we always add it raw to the blender of cooked fruit and then blend.  I like doing it this way because I feel like once you cook spinach it has a taste, but you can blend it into almost anything when fresh and it doesn’t change the flavour at all.  (You can check out our hulk sauce recipe here – it’s a favourite of ours and includes spinach AND chia seeds!)

So a quick recap…

– wash and core apples and pears

– put them in a pot

– save spinach and kale, add any other fruits or veggies to the pot (berries, mango, even carrot!)

– add a little bit of water (1 tablespoon to 1/4 cup)

– cook covered on very low heat until fruit/veggies are fork soft

– allow cooked fruit/veggies to cool

– transfer the cooked fruit/veggies to a blender (including any liquid in the pot)

– add fresh spinach or kale if desired

– blend until completely smooth

– transfer into small jars for storage

These will keep in the fridge for about a week and for ages in the freezer.  To defrost them, I simply take them out of the freezer and let them defrost on their own either on the counter at room temp or in the refrigerator (depending on how much time I have).  You can also pop them into your kiddo’s lunch bag frozen and come lunchtime, the sauce will be thawed and ready to eat!  Bonus?  It serves as an ice pack in the meantime.

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