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I erred in making apple sauce by not coring and peeling the apples before cooking. Now I have a large quantity of bitter apple sauce. Is there anything I can add to counteract the tannic flavor?

Brian K1LI
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There's a similar question on here about soup, and part of the advice holds true -- try spooning small amounts out into cups, and experiment with various things that are known to help mask bitterness (salty, sweet, and sour), and whichever works best use for the whole batch.

I wouldn't recommend dairy for apple sauce, though.

Joe
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Adding balsamic apple cider vinegar almost completely counteracted the tannic flavors. I don't suppose this is something everyone has on their pantry shelf, but I press my own cider (not from Yellow Transparent apples!) and ferment it into any number of other elixirs.

Brian K1LI
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Sugar and some acid is surely the classic answer. That's pretty much how the extreme bitterness of cola is handled.

Caffeine is one of the most bitter substances known to man but not all high-caffeine coffee tastes bitter, the thinking is that tiny oil droplets coat your tongue and protect it from the caffeine.

Perhaps you could pick fat you don't mind the flavour of, take a small amount of the apple sauce, make the separated sauce and the fat warm enough for the fat to be liquid, then process it in whatever high-speed blender/mixer/food processor you have and then mix it back into the sauce.

goboating
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  • I did consider fat, particularly because I wanted to turn some of the apple sauce into apple butter (fat ... butter ... get it?!) but I was worried that it would not be shelf-stable after canning. The leaf lard we render is unbelievable stable but I wouldn't want it in apple sauce. Any other stable fat suggestions? – Brian K1LI Sep 25 '19 at 01:10