I could use one of those!! I rarely ever make pies but I make copious amounts of applesauce in season and more than a few apple crisps and peeling the danged apples is the chore I dread. And my niece's apple tree, which provides most of the saucing apples each year, generates very tough skinned apples. My hand aches after a session of peeling :-((

Gardengal the peeler turns a chore into fun. Its mesmerizing to watch and Ilke to see how long a peel i can get before it breaks. Heres the finished pie. Sun was shining in the window.

I love my peeler, too. Metal one. I haven't started my baking yet, hard to get myself moving, but you’ve given me motivation!

Here’s a thought, Dedtired…could you please start a Dessert Photos post with your apple crumble? I’ll add my apple pie and key lime pies once they’re baked. I make apple pie every year, trying the key lime pie for something different

Yum! I wish I had an apple tree at this house...hmmmm.....

My apple pie with a crumb crust must have come out of the oven at the same time as dedtired's. But I had to hand-peel my 8 apples. Every so often, I have "Crust Day" and make a few crusts, put them in my pie plates and freeze them, so if the urge comes upon me, I can act on it. At least the food processor took care of the crumbs. Happy eating, everybody.

Sigh. I've never had one - maybe that should go onto my Santa list. It would save a few minutes at my sink, and DH's fav is apple pie. He is usually my apple peeler, corer, slicer, but he's left on some errands and I don't expect him back in time to be useful to me this afternoon....

I'm making the holiday version this afternoon, loved by DH and one nephew. It's really a simple apple pie made with tart apples and lattice crust, baked to almost done, then approx 1/3 C heavy cream is poured in through several of the top crust openings. Baked another 15 min after adding cream. Easy apple cream pie.

Oh, I don't know...you have to TURN it by HAND? ha-ha-ha

I see some advertised that say they'll peel pears as well as apples. DGS makes a mean apple/pear pie.

They will also peel potatoes. But does anyone actually peel potatoes anymore?

Rusty

I was peeling apples and pears today for our Praline Pear Apple pie!! Can't wait! The apples I peeled with an old time crank model. The pears I used a vegetable peeler. And yes I was peeling potatoes for last nights Slow cooker mushroom's and potatoes!

Dedtired - that looks like a nifty gadget. Apple pie is my DDIL's favorite dessert to bake and she's bringing one for Thanksgiving dinner. I'll have to ask DS if she peels the apples by hand - otherwise I now have a great gift idea for her. Thanks!

Watching that long peel suddenly brought back a long forgotten memory of my grandmother who peeled apples with her small paring knife and I would sit next to her and watch. She ate the apple and I ate the peel.

Maire

Never saw a clear one before - it's pretty!

My friends in CT have the old-fashioned metal one that clamps to the counter and the fruits go sideways, not upright like ded's. When I visited, we went apple picking and brought home a half bushel and made 3 pies. Their device sure made quick work of peeling, but the juice was very messy. I like that one up there since it looks better at containing the juice.

I've never had that many apples to peel for myself. I just use my old Ecko peeler that might be from the 60s, and is still as sharp as a razor.

And I peel potatoes often. They seem to hold together better in soups & stews if they're peeled.

I love my apple peeler but mine is the human variety. Seriously though, I do not need to peel apples often, but Dedtired's apple peeler is great.

A little story not too far off topic. I hope you don't mind. My husband helped me make French Apple Cake today by peeling the apples. He did not enjoy the chore and stated that I did not have to make this cake anymore, and I probably never will. I had a little mishap transferring it to a plate. Some on the floor and some on the counter. I salvaged the parts that fell on the counter. Not a cake dessert anymore more like a cakey cobbler.

Dedtired, what brand is that? I googled but didn't see it. I like the wide peels. I have an old White mountain peeler/corer and it does ok, but not very tidy at just peeling (I can tilt the corer back, but it nicks larger apples). This year I took all those skinny peels and cores and made vinegar.

Katie, its this one although as you can see, mine is all clear plastic.

Peeler

happy2, I'm sorry. This was the day for kitchen mishaps. I don't know where my thoughts were, but I measured out the flour, baking powder, salt, the one T sugar that goes in the dry part of my pie crust recipe, then proceeded to try to stir in the wet ingredients. I hadn't cut in the shortening! Tried to salvage, and no go....it would not roll. And I had 4 single crusts worth of ingredients. I am not a novice with pies, but you'd have never known that today. Done now and all looks good.

Your dessert looks good too. I'd serve alongside some ice cream or whipped cream and make it look intentional.

Oh, that one looks cool, mine is an old metal one, but it works fine and the kids like to turn the crank for me, so double bonus.

I also peel potatoes, but I just use a peeler. I always laugh at that commercial for the peeling device where the woman is working SO HARD at peeling potatoes, LOL. I have a vegetable peeler or just use a paring knife. If I need to peel several apples, though, out comes the peeler.

The pie looks pretty darned good too. Happy and morz8, I'm sorry about the kitchen mishaps, they certainly do happen. Fortunately my holiday baking went off without a hitch today, maybe because they didn't contain any apples.

Annie

Gardengal, never peel apples for apple sauce. You cook the whole thing--I do remove seeds--then put through a Foley food mill and that removes the peels. You want those to cook for added flavor.

Of course, you do have to peel them for pies.

Oops, see my link didnt work. The peeler is made by Starfritparfait.

Sorry laceyvail, that won't work for me :-) No peels in applesauce at any stage of the process. I don't think they add any flavor, I don't own a food mill and I prefer my applesauce on the chunky (not pulverized) side.

I got mine to make applesauce. That's mainly when I bother to get it out. It's not quite right, I had to take it apart to clean it and it's never been quite right since. Something is off on the tension . . . it doesn't core them right anymore, it hacks them up too much. It could be fixed I think but I haven't gotten it right yet. I have to say though, an apple peeler is one of the more nifty gadgets out there.

I have the same problem with my Victorio food mill. It's a newer one and it just doesn't work as well, it still makes a mess. But it is the best and fastest way to de-seed tomatoes. I didn't grow enough this year for sauce, plus I have some left over from last year's 50 tomato plant extravaganza. We got tomato-ed out . . .

I've had the classic for years. It peels, slices and cores all at once. A dozen apple trees it makes a swift job when overwhelmed needing quick fall harvest. Any round fruit or potatoes.

I have a back-up from a yard sale, NIB.

I have the metal one. I think I've used it twice in all these years.

l pinkmountain, why do you peel apples for applesauce? The skins are what gives it that lovely pink hue. They're left behind, along with the seeds, in a food mill.

It's probably a personal choice thing but I don't want apple peels in my applesauce. I don't need it to be pink, I don't own a food mill (and don't want one) and the peel of the apples from my niece's tree would take hours to cook down into a palatable form, by which time the sauce itself would be mush. And I prefer a textured, chunky applesauce, not baby food!

The peels aren't in the sauce, just a hint of color.

I use Macs or a combo of Macs and Cortlands. They cook in a matter of minutes. The food mill has 3 different discs for fine, medium, and coarse textures.

Also, no sugar needed.

gardengal, I peel the apples for sauce too. It's just my preference, I'd rather just get out my little apple peeler, peel and core, then mash up the cooked apples. My big Squeezo is good if I'm doing a LOT of sauce, but it's bulky and harder to clean. So just a cannerful of apples gets peeled and cored and saves me from getting on a ladder in the garage, hauling down the Squeezo, setting it up, then cleaning and returning it to the storage spot. It would be easier if apples and tomatoes were ready at the same time, then I wouldn't bother to put the Squeezo back between processes. I do have a Foley, but my carpal tunnel complains after a certain amount of cranking that, so I won't do enough apples to make a canner full of sauce. I don't care about the color, and I can't tell the difference in flavor either way, so I do what's fastest and easiest for me.

It's also a lot faster to do a batch of apples for a pie or for crisp with the little peeler/corer.

Annie

I also have the red metal peeler/slicer/corer, and it makes quick work of the apples when I dehydrate them. We still have a lot of apples on our tree, and we might try to pick a bunch this weekend. We still have dehydrated apples from last year, but it's time to make a new batch.

I'd guess that metal peelers would last longer with metal, not plastic, gears.

My old fridge/freezer had a metal part to make crushed ice. The new one has plastic, with sub-par results.

What *isn't* plastic these days? A few years ago we replaced a 10-year-old GE fridge at our condo with the same model. The delivery men wheeled the new one up to the door with little effort. When they came in to load the old one, they commented on how much heavier it was. Plastic parts!

I peel apples for applesauce because I know WAY too much about what is on the peels, even after being washed. I love the pink hue and make pink applesauce when I can get some organic apples or Ida Reds. Not very often. I'll survive.

Organic apples are a given; whether you're making sauce or not. Apple peels contain lots of fiber and vitamins.

Why is it so hard to understand that at least some of us do not want apple peels in their applesauce or to need to use a food mill that they don't own to eliminate them? That may be your choice but not others. Let it go!!

And organic is not always a given!! Not always available, not always disclosed and not necessarily in everyone's budget.

Go ahead and peel your apples if it makes you happy. As for organic, even Walmart carries organic now.

Thanks so much for your permission!!

Sheesh!!

FWIW, I've made applesauce with whole apples, quartered and cooked, then passed through a food mill. All the peel and seeds and tough membranes get left behind in the food mill - no bits of peel in the sauce whatsoever.

It's definitely a bit faster and simpler than peeling and coring.

^^^

Apparently that's not a popular opinion on this thread. Whatever. It works great for me.

I think everyone should do it the way they like. (shrug) Cooking (and taste) is not objective, it's subjective. We don't all like the same foods or the same techniques or whatever. For instance, I detest wine and beer, and that's not a particularly popular opinion on this forum either, but somehow I get over it, LOL.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled cooking....

Annie

I’ve used just the apple peelings to make wonderful apple jelly.

My grandmother made pink applesuce that didn't taste like apples. I'm with Annie on to each his own flavor, but there's one exception.... I had a classic sideways crank peeler. It took off too much flesh. Not a problem, probably, if you have multiple trees and have to process a whole crop, I don't know where mine went... I'm now in love with Dedtired's.

Apple is my favorite pie.

I have two in the freezer, John, and you can have one if you want to come to SoCal get it...

I eat a lot of apples and try to buy organic, but they are not always available ( honeycrisp or pink lady) and are expensive. Always peel!

Beautiful Pie!!

Oooh Happy2, now I want to try a French apple cake. I love little cakes. Easier for me than pie . . . I have crust phobia. I LOVE all things doughy but just don't have the skills set or patience. I make a mean apple bundt cake loaded with apples, but it takes a while to peel and slice the five apples it calls for, and if I'm not serving a crowd, no sense in having that large of a cake just languish. I make little apple cakes in my square baking pan but I want to try this one in a round cake pan. I love the summer torte in the summer, no reason not to enjoy it with winter fruits and a streusel topping . . .

I don’t make enough things with apple to bother with a peeler but we all love homemade apple sauce. Between the handful of growers in my area, finding organic products is not a problem, thankfully, but I scrub them before coring any way. The pink applesauce, nice and chunky, is a winner with my old and trusty foley mill. My mother gave me hers when she decided that she was finished with cooking.

If I come across some Macintosh apples in the store, I will peel those as they are not likely to be organic, then mince them up to add to already processed apple sauce for some of that wonderful Mac flavor, They don’t grow them around here. 🍎

Applesauce flavors are another issue too. Apparently my family has an inordinate love of applesauce, or so my husband says. I can it because the big store-bought jars usually spoil on me and my Dad before we can eat it all up. I can in the small half pint jars, just right for two servings for one person. The little store-bought kiddie cups just don't have the flavor, IMHO.

I've experimented with a lot of apples for pies and sauce. McIntosh gives the classic "Mott's" applesauce flavor. I'm not a huge fan but many are. Some other types of apples are too watery and bland for my taste in applesauce. My favorites, Cortland and Empire, are not often available. Another favorite that I can sometimes get, is Jonagold.

Just about the only reliable apple that I can get for applesauce that I like is golden delicious. That's a tad tart but can always be mixed with milder gala or Macs, which are the other kinds of apples I can get, along with red delicious. Other wonderful cooking apples I used to be able to get locally were Northern Spy and Ida Red, which makes great pink applesauce. The orchard outlet closed down last year, sigh. That's just my taste, which is I think way more tart and chunky than most.

I don't buy organic because they are much more expensive than the basic apples I can buy on sale locally. I've posted before that we stick to the cheapest basics for most of our food shopping. If I'm going organic, it will be where I can get the most bang for my buck, like celery or greens.

Finally yesterday when I was at the store I saw they got some local apples in, which were under 2 bucks a lb. my usual spending goal for produce. I got red delicious and gala, because that and Macs and Fuji were all they had. I am not a fan of Fuji apples. Particularly when they pick them green for commercial sale. They are easy to grow though, along with Gala. That's why they are so popular. Our store usually has all the common types at a reasonable price, but I guess around the holidays they ran low . . .

I am going to the farm market an hour away tomorrow, should be able to get some nice produce then. I am going to get greens for decorating the house. Nothing reasonably priced locally. Sort of sad, considering how I live smack dab in the middle of some of the best farmland in the world. But it's just too tough for small producers of specialty crops anymore. It's not a resource viability issue, it's an economic return on time and money invested issue.

FWIW, my mom told me that when she was a kid, during the Great Depression, when my grandma made pie, Mom and her sisters would eat the apple peels dipped in cinnamon sugar as a snack. Waste not, want not, I guess. They had an apple tree in their backyard, right outside the girls' bedroom window.

& @ Judi, et al. - there are comments above that lead me to believe some folks think cooking the peels with the apples means there will be peel in the applesauce, which is not the case IMPE.

Not only are modern apple peels laden with pesticides, they are also routinely treated with carnuba wax which gives them the long shelf life in the store and at home. Carnuba wax is not listed as toxic, although I could find no research backing up any studies of long term effects of eating it.

I actually did a deep dive into the scientific literature on apple peels and what might be on them and how to get it off. When I was blogging, I wrote a blog post about it. https://lpinkmountain.blogspot.com/2014/03/ms-rose-makes-pink-applesauce.html 

I found very little actual research on what's on apples and how to get it off. No point in funding it without a big economic return for the knowledge. Also, considering the millions of pounds of apples grown in the US, would be very hard to do a study that is statistically significant and could be applied in general. The tests for the pesticides are expensive and they do not test apples widely. No way of really knowing what's on your apples and apple producers don't much like to talk about it. At least the ones I've talked to. Apples are sampled for pesticides, but it is not wide spread.

BTW, I love all things apple, from the tree to the flower to the fruit to dishes made with it. I understand why apples are so pesticide intensive too, all tree fruits really. To grow them organically is a very difficult undertaking at a reasonable scale and price point. We have grown accustomed to long supply chains and snazzy looking fruit with a long home shelf life too. I am not an anti-pesticide purist, just an apple peeler most of the time although I do take a walk on the wild side and eat an apple snack from time to time, peels and all!!

Here's my blog post on the subject, which covers my research into what might be on the peels, and how to remove it. If I wanted to eat apple peels more often or make huge batches of applesauce to make it worth the time to run them through a mill, I would follow my blog advice, although my advice is way above and beyond the standard food safety advice you will get from Cooperative Extension or the FDA. Has links for more information.

https://lpinkmountain.blogspot.com/2014/03/ms-rose-makes-pink-applesauce.html

Pink, you aren’t exaggerating about how tight lipped apple growers can be about their pesticide use. When I was studying pomology at Virginia Tech, I did a research project about pesticide use, misuse, and the hazards to orchard workers and their families. Good grief, it was nuts how difficult it was to get any useful information and/or records from those guys.

Even within the vast in-house research orchards, sharing information about the pesticides used was not very forthcoming. I had to get my research advisor to intercede on my behalf.

The apples I get in my farm box are organic, normal sized, like from my childhood (not the mutants from Sleeper) and full of flavor. They haven't had the flavor bred out. Their peaches are the same way. It's a falacy to think that organically grown tastes better, but I think (opinion not backed by research) that the sustainable farming methods allow them to choose to grow better tasting fruit. I'm not sure what type it was since I have a variety on hand, but the small apple I put in my greens mixture the other day was so sweet and intensely flavored (and good!) it made collards and kale taste apple-y,

I got tempted into looking for Dedtired's apple peeler since I'd made two pies in one day last month. I could only find one with red gears thathave bad chemicals (one assumes heavy metals in the color), and passed even though they're enclosed. I got a different design to try, but I don't think it'll be as good. We'll see...

I'm studying regenerative soil ecology right now. It's a revolution in farming, focusing on soil interactions. We've been missing the boat on a lot of things that create healthy food plants. But still fruits are tough to grow commercially, so many things attracted to them, for obvious reasons. I can understand the tight lipped attitudes of apple growers, they are struggling to figure it all out themselves and so much misinformation, and here-say out there, they don't even want to go there. In these days of social media, things get blown out of proportion fast, as does half baked information get spread easily and stick in people's minds, hard to then dislodge. But still, would be nice if the scientific literature was more available.

BTW, that's why my professor, Dr. Elaine Ingham, founded the Soil Food Web school. She taught at Univ. of Oregon for many years, and advised the Dept. of Agriculture. But there is a lot of money at stake in farming, and very stiff competition. So she founded her own school, which is all about sharing knowledge and doing hands-on research on your own, not something that depends on big research bucks that inevitably will go to producing products that make big bucks for the research's sponsors, not on ways for farmers to keep the big bucks in their own pockets! That's why I've been scarce on fb and my blog, I'm trying to knuckle down and study. Her certification courses are graduate level work!

If anyone is interested in a good read on tree fruit farming, I highly recommend "Epitaph for a Peach, Four Seasons On My Family Farm " by David Masumoto. Not only a lot of interesting information on trying to grow organic fruit, but also a very insightful meditation on family farming and the contributions of immigrants to American agriculture!!

So, in reality, the knockoff one I got really is the same, but the apple is on the horizontal post and the blade is on a vertical turntable. I just tried it with a thick skinned granny smith that was left in the bowl from Thanksgiving. It was weird, and odd to get going, and then it just did its thing. Super easy to mount the apple and turn the crank and the resulting peel had very little apple clinging to it. This is a wonderful gadget, worth the space it takes.

Thank-you Dedtired!