The Spruce Eats and Southern Living agree that the best applesauce uses a combination of apple varieties — and there’s no wrong combination. Southern Living recommends a mixture of apple types to give your applesauce a more complex flavor and a more varied texture, as each variety cooks up a bit differently. Meanwhile, The Spruce Eats says that choosing a sweeter apple, like Golden Delicious, coupled with a tart variety, like McIntosh, and rounded out with a crisp apple like Braeburn would give your applesauce an ideal flavor and consistency, though there’s no limit to the apple assortments you can create.
Depending on your apple combination, you may not need to sweeten your applesauce at all. But if you do, Bon Appétit cautions against over-sweetening homemade applesauce, and they recommend using small amounts of brown sugar, demerara, or turbinado sugars for more complex flavor. Once you’ve added a little sweetener, taste your concoction, and if the applesauce still isn’t as sweet as you’d like, you can add maple syrup or honey at the table, allowing everyone to sweeten to their liking. And if you find that you’ve been overzealous in your mixed-variety applesauce production, there are a number of ways to use leftover applesauce, including making your own fruit leather or as a step toward homemade apple butter.
