Reduced-sugar Apple Butter

I just bought a bag of 'drops' -- apples gathered from under the trees in the fall.  They're perfectly good, but because they have a bruise on one side they need to be used right away.  This is a recipe for making a LOT of apple butter, if you are so lucky as to have a lot of apples.  This recipe uses about half of what other recipes call for, but honestly it's PLENTY sweet. 

Update, 2017:  Since publishing this, I've made apple butter without ANY ingredients other than applesauce, and honestly I think that's my favorite.  Just apples.  It does help to brighten up the flavor with a little lemon juice or cider vinegar, and if you really like the spices, by all means go ahead.  But honestly, just cooking down apples makes a delicious butter.

Ingredients:

Apples
Brown sugar and/or white sugar
Cider vinegar
Ground cinnamon, allspice, ginger, cloves
Slat


1. Make applesauce:  Wash and quarter the apples and put them in a large pot on low heat, cover.  No need to peel or seed them. Stir occasionally until they are quite soft.  Push through your favorite sieve.  My 1/2 bushel of apples yielded about 6 lbs of applesauce, or about 3 quarts. 

2.  Mix in other ingredients:  So here's the basic proportions I used:
6 lb applesauce (12 cup)
1 lb white sugar (2 cup)
0.5 lb brown sugar (little less than 1 cup)
1 cup cider vinegar
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp salt

Mix all together and put in a large pan so that there's a lot of surface area for the sauce, e.g. a couple of inches deep.  I use a big lasagna pan or a dutch oven.  Make sure there's plenty of pan sides above the sauce because it will blorp a little while it's cooking down. 

3. Set your oven on 325 and put the pan in carefully, uncovered.  Cook it down until it's fairly dense and stays on the spoon, stirring occasionally.  How longs this takes depends on how wet your apples were and how much surface area for evaporation there is.  Could be anywhere from 3 to 6 hours.  Many people use a slow cooker on "low" instead of the oven.  In my case, I got about 10 cups of apple butter from my half bushel of apples.  And the house still smells great!