What Apples are Best for Applesauce? - Robinette's Apple Haus & Winery (2025)

FAQs

What type of apples make the best applesauce? ›

Use different apple varieties for a mix of sweet and tart flavors with firm and soft textures. I'm partial to Jonagolds, Fujis, and Golden Delicious. You can peel your apples for a smoother texture, but I prefer the added flavor that intact peels bring.

Bright green Granny Smith apples are one of the most popular varieties for pie. Their puckery-tart flavor prevents fillings from tasting too sweet, they're easy to find year-round, and they hold their shape beautifully when baked.

Gala. A crisp, sweet apple with a mild flavor, Galas have yellow-orange skin with red striping. They're among the best apples for applesauce, salads, eating out-of-hand, and pressing into cider.

Applesauce-Making Tips

Stay away from Red Delicious apples when making sauce. They don't mix well with heat and get undesirably mushy and unpalatable.

Golden Delicious

These apples are grown in Washington, Pennsylvania, and Canada.

The mellow sweetness of toasted sugar adds complexity. Apple cider vinegar helps brighten cooked fruit. Using skin-on fruit improves both flavor and color in the finished product. Aromatics like cinnamon, orange peel, and rose water intensify the flavor of the apples.

Its firm flesh makes Paula Red a good fresh eating and cooking apple, especially good for a delicious, naturally pink applesauce and for pie making. It is an early season apple ripening in late August, and like most early apples, Paula Red does not keep for too long.

Red June, Yellow June, and Gravenstein are early season apples that make good applesauce. If you want to make pie, you want an apple that doesn't fall to pieces when cooked, so Horse, Hunge, Aunt Rachel, and Mary Reid would be good choices.

What are the top 3 best apples? ›

There are a few apples that don't make the cut. While great for snacking, Gala, Fuji and Red Delicious are the most common apples that won't hold up in the oven and will give you a watery-mushy pie, tart or cake.

Fuji and Golden delicious make a great combination for homemade unsweetened applesauce. We have a lot of apple festivals here in Portland so one of my favorite things to do is go and taste the apples and choose which ones I want to use to make my applesauce.

Honeycrisp: You might be able to tell by its name, but Honeycrisp apples are where it's at when it comes to loads of juiciness and honey-like sweetness! One unique feature of this sweet apple is its cells fracture perfectly when you take a bite out of it, resulting in the perfect crunch.

Homemade applesauce can be refrigerated for a week to ten days; it can also be frozen or canned for longer-term storage. Mott's recommends its applesauce to be used within ten days of opening. First let me introduce our panel.

For the best pies, crisps, and other baked treats, apples need to be firm enough to hold their own during the cooking process. We call these apples “baking apples” and to namedrop, they include Braeburn, Cortland, Honey Gold, Jonathan, Fuji, Gala, Granny Smith, Haralson, and Newtown Pippin.