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30+ Apple Canning Recipes

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Apple Canning Recipes are perfect for preserving apples in season and allow you to make the best of autumn’s bounty.  Cool air, fiery foliage, and bushels of sweet, crisp apples are the epitome of a New England autumn. From pie filling and applesauce to apple chutneys and cider, there are so many ways to can apples.

Recipes for Canning Apples

Today, we can walk into our local grocery store all winter long and expect a wide selection of fruit. A hundred years ago, that simply wasn’t the case. Especially in areas with long cold winters, like New England, apples were among the only fruits you could enjoy into winter. 

Most modern houses lack cool, moist basements and definitely don’t have root cellars. For most people, canning apples is the best way to preserve their harvest and ensure a dependable supply of apples all winter long.

Given that, apple canning recipes are one of the best ways to preserve apples at home.  They’re also some of the tastiest homemade preserves anywhere!

Apple Canning Recipes

Applesauce is one of the most popular canning recipes for people just getting started. It’s completely foolproof and handy to have in the pantry. Kids love it, it’s a great snack if you’re under the weather, and it works well in baking.

While kids will eat plenty of applesauce, most adults prefer apple recipes with more distinct flavor. Thankfully, all of the apple canning recipes are pretty easy to make, and there’s a great variety to choose from.

Apple Slices

Many people can or purchase pear slices in cans, but apple slices seem to have fallen out of favor. This is a real shame because apple slices are easily one of the most versatile apple canning recipes.

Home-canned apple slices are delicious. They’re perfect for topping yogurt or oatmeal and work well in recipes like apple cake, crisp, or pie.

Apple Pie Filling

Canning apple pie filling is straightforward and easy, just like canning apple slices. It’s a similar process with the addition of traditional pie spices and a canning-safe thickener that makes it ready to go.

For this recipe, you need to use a specific thickener known as clear gel, which is safe for canning. Unlike other thickeners, clear gel doesn’t interfere with heat transfer to the center of the jar.

Clear gel has the added benefit of staying thick even if it’s heated and cooled multiple times. This means it will still give you a thick pie filling even after it has been water bath canned and then baked in your pie.

Whole Apples or Crabapples

As you probably guessed, canning standard-size apples whole isn’t practical. This recipe is actually designed for crabapples. They are usually too small to bother with peeling and coring and easily fit into a jar whole so it makes sense to process them this way.

Crabapples are usually too tart to eat fresh or plain, but they have amazing flavor canned in spiced syrup.

Enjoy one atop your oatmeal or pork roast in the middle of winter for a tasty treat.

Canning Crabapples

Apple Jam

Apple jam is one jam you won’t find on the grocery store shelf. It has an intense, delicious, concentrated flavor, but if you want to taste some, you’ll probably have to try making this historic recipe yourself.

Apple jam begins with finely diced apples macerated in sugar. The sugar firms them up and allows them to hold their shape while cooking. Unlike in applesauce, where they cook down smooth, the apples remain in tiny pieces. This recipe for a chunky jam always reminds me of biting into a fresh autumn apple.

It’s delicious plain or with the spices of your choice.

Apples are also excellent for adding to other fruit jams. These jams don’t tend to have a lot of apple flavor, but the apple acts as a great source of pectin which firms up the jam. These recipes tend to be about half apple and then half berry or other fruit. It’s a great way to preserve an abundance of apples or make your blueberries or other berries stretch a little further.

Though they don’t have an overpowering apple flavor, they are still half apple, so I decided they were worth including on this list.

Apple Jam

Apple Jelly

You can make apple jelly from diced apples, apple scraps, or a combination of the two. In my kitchen, apple jelly is how we get one more use out of the leftover peels and cores from other apple recipes before I feed the scraps to the chickens. 

My recipe for apple scrap jelly, which you can see in the photo below, will be up on the website soon. I make a similar peach scrap jelly during the summer using the peels leftover from canning peaches. To make peach jelly, I have to add pectin because they don’t have much pectin of their own, but it’s unnecessary for apple scrap jelly.

Until that recipe is available, I have found a couple of other great apple jelly recipes for you to check out, including my friend Colleen’s no-sugar option. 

We also have a lot of crab apples, so I always make a batch of crabapple jelly. If you’ve ever tried eating a raw crab apple, you know they can be pretty tart on their own. In jelly, their intense flavor is softened by the sugar. They’re also full of pectin, so the jelly sets perfectly on its own without me having to add boxed pectin.

Crabapple Jelly

Apple Butter

Apple butter is like applesauce’s more mature, older brother. It’s basically the same thing as making applesauce, except that you slow-cook the apples for a longer time, allowing the natural sugars to caramelize. Unlike canning applesauce, adding lemon juice won’t keep the color yellow. The apples and their caramelized sugars form a sweet, thick brown paste with a deep caramel apple flavor that’s excellent on crackers, toast, and oatmeal.

Some modern recipes call for added sugar to speed up the caramelization process, but I prefer the traditional recipe, which just uses apples and a lot of patience.

While my favorite is the traditional option, there are some other versions of apple butter that are safe for canning. 

Apple Butter

Apple Sauces & Condiments

In addition to all the favorite apple sweets and treats, like pie filling and jam, apples make excellent additions to more savory recipes. You can find several canning-safe sauces and condiments that are excellent with a few apples in the mix. 

Apples have a nice balanced tart and sweet flavor, perfect for recipes like meat sauce or mustard.

Apple Marmalade

Apple marmalade is another tasty spread that you’re unlikely to find at your local grocery store. It has a wonderful, bright, sweet flavor and is easy to make at home. It’s acidic, making it safe for water bath canning.

I love using apple marmalade as a snack on toast or crackers, as an ingredient to glaze meat, or to create salad dressings and sauces. 

Applesauce

Homemade applesauce is one of the easiest ways to preserve apples.

Simply chop your apples into chunks, peel them, or leave the peels on, depending on your taste, and place them in a pot. Cook them down until mushy and then can them either chunky or smooth. If you want to remove the skins and are looking for a really smooth applesauce you can put them through a food mill before canning.

If you like the look of light-colored yellow, store-bought applesauce, treat your apples with lemon juice so that they don’t brown. That just changes their aesthetic, not flavor, so it’s perfectly fine to let them brown for a more old-fashioned look.

It’s also safe to add other acidic fruits to the mix. Small jars filled with purple or pink berry applesauce are always a favorite with the kids.  

Applesauce for Canning

Apple Cider

Fresh-pressed apple cider is fall in a glass. I love its sweet, slightly tart flavor. When you make fresh cider, though, you need to use it or pasteurize it fairly quickly. In less than 24 hours, fresh cider can ferment into hard cider.

Those jugs of apple cider you purchase at a grocery store have been pasteurized to quickly kill off any yeast. This process doesn’t dramatically change the flavor.

Canning fresh apple cider at home is no different. It kills the yeast, prevents fermentation, but maintains the classic brown cider color and delicious flavor.

Canning Apple Cider

Apple Cider Syrup (Boiled Cider)

Thick and sweet apple cider syrup is a Vermont staple. It is similar to maple syrup, but rather than boiling down maple tree sap, you boil down your fresh cider until it becomes syrup.

Like maple syrup, the sugars keep it mostly shelf stable, and it’ll last for several months on its own. However, it will eventually spoil, especially if it’s stored in a warm kitchen. Canning will prevent spoilage, allowing you to keep it for months without worry. Canning cider syrup is simple. It just needs to be water-bath canned for 10 minutes with a quarter-inch of headspace.

Apple Juice

Apple juice is fairly similar to apple cider, but there are a few extra steps you need to take before canning. To make apple juice you remove the pectin from cider by heating and filtering it. Then, you can can your juice.

Personally, I prefer cider, but my kids are on the Apple juice team. I can it in half-pint mason jars to make single-serve “juice boxes” for them. It’s a great treat that tastes even better than store-bought.

Pickled Apples

If you’ve perused the pickle section of this website, you’ve probably noticed that you can pickle just about anything. Unsurprisingly, you can pickle apples.

Pickling fruit was more common a couple of hundred years ago. For some reason, people in the past had fewer qualms about mixing sweet and savory flavors. I find apples, pickled in apple cider vinegar, to be a tasty snack. They have minimal or no salt but a good bit of added sugar.

The apples, sugar, and vinegar mix well to give them a nice balance of tang and sweetness. I love including them on charcuterie boards. They’re excellent paired with a cracker and a chunk of blue cheese.

(You can also pickle whole crabapples, which look beautiful and festive in the pantry. In a practical sense, I find them less useful than pickled apple rings.)

Apple Relish

Apple relish is similar to apple pickles, except the apples you finely dice your apples before combing them with vinegar, sugar, and spices. Relish is a great foolproof recipe for water bath canning.

I love using apple relish on sausages and brats served in the fall. 

Apple Chutney

Chutney is another sweet-and-savory condiment that blends the lines between sweet and savory. It’s often made with fruit, including apples, onions, vinegar, and spices. It’s a great sweet-and-sour condiment.

You can make a basic apple chutney like the Indian Apple Chutney from Healthy Canning, with apples and warm spices as the star. Other recipes allow you to play with other produce, adding rhubarb, tomatoes, and other ingredients.

Other Fun Apple-y Recipes

Beyond recipes using actual apples, you can also make a lovely flower jelly from fragrant apple blossoms in the spring.  This only works if you happen to be growing apples or crabapples, but it is a fun way to make yet another fun apple canning recipe.

Apple Blossom Jelly

Ways to Preserve Apples

Want more ways to preserve apples? There are plenty of delicious methods you can use to put up the harvest:

Autumn Canning Recipes

Keep your canner running this fall with these seasonal canning recipes:

Apple Canning Recipes

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