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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Thanks for this fantastic recipe! We had great fun making it. I’d just like to put a note for any North Americans making this delicious chutney (who can by volume, not weight) – I made a double batch, and had almost exactly 4.5 litres (9 x 500 ml jars). Thanks again!
Hi, this time last year was my first attempt at making chutney and I found the effort therapeutic and the end result very satisfying 🙂 I seem to have several friends who are only to happy to offload their spare apples onto me so I have tried several different apple-based chutney recipes and have been delighted with them all. Not being a fan of sultanas, in fact I loathe them, I substituted them in your recipe for dried cranberries, and the result, wow!! A beautiful deep red chutney that is sweet enough but not too sweet. Many thanks for the recipe, will be using your website again. Kind regards 🙂
I have just made my first batch and finished bottling it at 3.30am – a long old night 🙂 It smells delicious but tastes a little too vinegary at the moment – maybe I should try it with some bread and cheese rather than straight out the pan 🙂
Can’t wait to taste it again in a months time. I only hope I can wait that long 🙁
Hi Kathy
Hope that you got to bed before midnight. I reckon that your simmer might have been a little too slow or your pan a bit tooo big. It’s difficult to get it right first time.
The first time I made chutney I made a vast amount in a huge pan and it took eight hours to cook. So it stretched over two days!
Hi Shelia
Thanks for your input.
Hello KarenO
What a wonderful story. So pleased that the nasty apples turned into great chutney! Thanks for dropping by.
What an absolutely fabulous recipe. We came across 3 apple trees a few weeks back. No1 was delicious cooking apples – needless to say only a very small yield. No 2 was eating apples – bit tasteless but cooked into a delicate pleasant stewed apple – we managed 2 carrier bags full of these. N o 3 was naf!!. Didn’t taste good raw or cooked & took forever to cook!! I put them into a wine so I didn’t have to bother to peel or core them & hope the lemon, sultanas & tea will add flavour. We passed the same tree earlier in the week & ever the optimist I noticed they were more red. Aha we’d obviously picked too early. WRONG!! 8.5kg later we got home to discover they were just as bad as a few weeks ago. I peeled 1.5kg & informed hubby (who’d picked most of them cos I couldn’t reach!) that if this apple chutney didn’t do something to improve them they were going on the compost heap. 4 hours later I had produced the most delicious chutney from these dreadful apples. So guess who’ll be back next year!! My newly-wed daughter was also planning to make chutney for Christmas presents for her huge family this year so the other 7kg will soon be peeled & in the freezer (awaiting a free afternoon & a few scrounged jam jars!) Thank you Fiona for sharing your lovely recipe.
Kathy, the liquid in mine had more or less cooked away so that is odd, I hope you got to bed before midnight :).
Sheila
Hey, great recipe but mine was still very runny after 4 hours! Turned the heat up a bit so hope it’ll be done soon so I can go to bed before midnight. Should have started earlier.
Well it is made, potted and labelled, and looks delicious. I tried a teaspoon of the still warm mixture and it was good, so after one month I it should be excellent.
Thank you so much and may I say was a great website you have created here, and I came upon it accidently, but it is now in my favourites.
:):):):)
Thank you so much for your prompt reply, it will be on the boil this afternoon! :):)
Hi Sheila
I use white wine vinegar. Hope that it turns out well for you.