Boost Your Homemade Apple Butter With One Natural And Sweet Addition

Despite its name, apple butter has no butter whatsoever. Instead, apples are stewed with spices, sugar, and cider into an ultra-concentrated form of apple sauce. The reduction is smooth and silky like butter with a deep brown, caramelized hue and epitomizes the taste of fall. While brown or white sugar are common ingredients in apple butter, honey is the natural and sweet addition that'll boost your homemade butter.

Honey isn't just sweeter than sugar, but it's also much more complex, with tasting notes that range from floral to fruity. Furthermore, it's an ingredient that can enhance the flavor of fruit, like we do in this simple fruit salad with honey-lime dressing. The tasting notes in your honey brand of choice will bring more depth of flavor to apple butter while also sweetening it. As a liquid ingredient, honey will easily disperse throughout the stewed apples as you blend them. You can use honey as the sole sweetener in your apple butter. 

Honey is sweeter than sugar, so you can start with three-quarters of a cup of honey for every two pounds of apples. Another idea is to use honey and brown sugar in equal amounts like we do in our recipe for honey apple butter. The floral fruitiness of the honey will compliment the deep caramelized richness of the brown sugar for an especially complex sweetness to pair with the baking spices and the ideal kind of apples.

Adding honey to an apple butter recipe is a way to be deliberate with the sweeteners you use, which is one of many tips we share about making apple butter. Another is to add an acidic component like lemon juice or vinegar to balance the sweetness. Spicing up your apple butter is another crucial tip for a well-rounded flavor profile and getting that quintessential taste of fall. Cinnamon, all-spice, cardamom, nutmeg, and cloves are all warm fall seasonings that will work in apple butter; a pro-tip is to buy spices whole and grind them yourself for optimal freshness.

Apple butter is a sweet condiment that you can use in countless ways. The most obvious application is as a spread for your morning toast or to stir into a bowl of oatmeal. Blend apple butter into soft, whipped butter for the ultimate fall garnish for pancakes, waffles, fluffy buttermilk biscuits, and cornbread. You can use it as a fruit preserve to pair with peanut butter for your next PB&J. Apple butter is an easy addition to cheesecake recipes to bring a hint of fall.

In an exclusive with Half-Baked Harvest founder Tieghan Gerard, she recommended using apple butter in savory dishes like salad dressings. To that effect, we recommend incorporating apple butter into glazes for pork chops and ribs. Apple butter would also be a great addition to a charcuterie or cheese board. You can also swap fig spread for apple butter when making your next baked brie.