Apple Chutney recipe
Posted by Fiona Nevile in Chutney and Pickles | 252 comments
Our apples make great chutney
I’m not surprised that the fruit that tempted Eve was an apple. It is such a useful fruit. From sweet apple puree to flagons of frothy cider, the apple plays a major role in our lives.
It always troubles me when I see apples left unpicked on trees. We’ve had a great cooking apple harvest this year. Danny and I have spent the morning picking apples from the old trees in our tiny orchard. We are going to make cider this year and have a go at apple wine. So we left a great pile of them on the garden table to soften in the frosts.
If you do this it’s easier to extract the juice. The ones that we pick from the tree are wrapped in newspaper and stored in cardboard boxes in the shed. The mice do nibble a few but the majority keep through the winter until we need them.
The windfalls don’t keep. Even if they look good they are bruised when they hit the ground. We have loads of windfalls, so we decided to branch out and add apple chutney to our range. As with our plum chutney we wanted a fruit rather than a vegetable taste.
This delicate chutney is the result.
| Cottage Smallholder Apple Chutney recipe |
- 1.5 k of cooking apples
- 500g of onions
- 500g of sultanas
- 750g Demerara sugar
- 500ml of white wine vinegar
- Zest and juice of two lemons
- I small chilli
- 1 tsp ground ginger
- 1 tsp ground allspice
- ½ tsp of cinnamon
- Pinch of ground cloves
- ½ tsp of Maldon sea salt
- 8 peppercorns
- 1 tbsp of mustard seed
- Wash, peel, core and chop the apples fine
- Peel and chop and mince the onions (if you don’t have a mincer chop them very fine)
- Put all ingredients into a large heavy bottomed saucepan and bring slowly to the boil. Stirring until the sugar is dissolved.
- Then simmer very gently, bubbles barely breaking the surface, until the chutney has thickened, stiring every now and then.
- It is ready when drawing a spoon across the surface leaves a definite track mark. This will take at least four hours.
- Pot into warm sterilised jars with plastic lined lids (how do I sterilise jars and lids? See Tips and Tricks below).
- Don’t use cellophane lids as the vinegar will evaporate through these and your chutney will dry up.
- Label when cold and store in a cool, dry place.
- Leave to mature for a month. The longer that you leave it to mature the better it will be!
Tips and Tricks
<strong>How do I get rid of tainted smells in pots?</strong>
If your cooking pot or container is tainted with the smell of the last resident (curry, tomato sauce etc). Sprinkle with a good tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda into it and add a good splosh of boiling water. Rub the solution over all surfaces and leave for two minutes. Rinse well in cold water.
<strong>How do I sterilise jars and lids?</strong>
The sterilising method that we use is simple. When the chutney is cooked, I quickly wash and rinse the jars and place them upside down in a cold oven. Set the temperature to 160c (140c fan assisted). When the oven has reached the right temperature I turn off the heat. The jars will stay warm for quite a while. I only use plastic lined metal lids for preserves as the all-metal lids can go rusty. I boil these for five minutes in water to sterilise them. If I use Le Parfait jars, I do the same with the rubber rings.
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I have made a plum chutney using part cider vinegar and white wine vinegar. The chutney has been simmering for five hours however, it seems to taste very vinegary? Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated on recifying this.
Hi Lesley
Did you use our recipe? It’s difficult to advise if I don’t know the recipe that you followed.
Extra sugar should help and at least 6 months maturing too.
could you tell me if I could make apple chutney in a slow cooker? If so how long should I cook it and lid on or off?
Hi – What a good site, that I found when trying to deal with a glut of soft fruit last year. I have made 2 batches of this chutney (having never done anything like this before) and they have turned out great – but a bit too popular with friends!
With my second batch (having seen another recipe) I left out the chilli and upped the ginger content for the heat. Your recipe with the chilli is certainly more to my liking.
One question however – bottling my second batch I ran out of jars and had to fill a 1l jar with surplus. I would now like to put this in smaller bottles – Would i need to reheat the chutney before putting in the sterilised jars?
Many thanks
I have just found your site while looking for chutneys.
I am very impressed and I will be using your recipe after all the great comments on your site, it is very friendly.
Thanks Dolores
Hi,
Just wanted to thank you for posting this recipe – I made this chutney in Summer ’09 (we had a bumper crop of apples) and it turned out really well. Our apples are eating apples so the final result was quite sweet. However, it went extremely well with things like sheep’s cheese and blue cheese. I am posting now as I am just coming to the end of my very last jar – we had a very wet Spring here (West Coast of Canada) this year and we had a very poor apple crop this summer = no 2010 apple chutney. So I am hoping for a good year in 2011 as I’d love to make this again!
Hi there
Okay, so I made this, and love it. I looked all over the web for more info. about whether chutney needs a water bath pasteurization (I was using the bormioli rocco fido jars), and it seems like botulism isn’t a concern since it’s so acidic, but do you really not even boil the full jars for 10 or 15 minutes, and you still don’t have a problem with mold after months of shelf storage?
thank you!
hi there,
great recipe. this is probably a dumb question, but when you pot these (especially into the le parfait, which I’ll use), do you seal them when the chutney is still hot? since you don’t mention doing a water bath, I’m assuming the chutney lasts a long time partly because it’s well-sealed, and that the seal would be better if it’s created when the chutney is still hot, but I haven’t yet canned this way, so I’m not sure.
thanks!
Made this chutney on Sunday. Used Mixed spice in place of all spice, cider vinegar in place of ww vinegar and the sugar was a mixture of soft brown, golden granulated, muscavado and white granulated to use everything up.
I know that chutney is supposed to mature before it really tastes good but this tastes amazing already. we had it still warm with our roast dinners….YUM!
Hello Rachel
This is good news. The chutney will taste fabulous when it matures then 😉
Hi guys,
made your fantastic chutney over a month ago and is fantastically popular, most say I find it VERY nice myself as well! I didn’t have mustard seeds though and just used wholegrain mustard instead, also I used muscovado sugar.
I will make it again for christmas presents but use the exact right ingredients this time.
Thanks for a great recipe and running a great blog!
MADE APPLE CHUTNEY USING EXACT INRGEDIENTS FROM RECIPE BUT USED SLOW COOKER
AFTER 5 HOURS IT SEEMED TO BE GETTING THINNER INSTEAD OF THICKER SO I PANICKED AND PUT IT INTO JARS THINKING IT WOULD THICKEN IN THE JARS
AFTER TWO WEEKS IT STILL LOOKS RUNNY CAN I PUT BACK INTO PAN TO THICKEN?
Hi Janet M
Did you leave the lid on the slow cooker? If so the chutney would not thicken.
Yes you can re simmer the chutney, it’s very forgiving. Use freshly sterilised jars to pot it up though.