Made in NC: Heirloom Goodness Applesauce

Inspired by their mother’s recipes, Durham sisters Mary Goodwin and Patty Downey started Heirloom Goodness Applesauce after taking on cooking applesauce as a hobby. Mary and Patty took the time to speak with Neecole Bostick over a bowl of applesauce.

“Now this is the Fuji Pink,” said Goodwin. “Usually, we only use one apple in our jars. Fuji Pink is the only one we put two apples together. The Fuji is so sweet that it has a runny texture to it, so we put the Pink Lady in to thicken it up. Texture is a funny thing with applesauce.”

The applesauces made by Heirloom are cooked in kettles, the old-fashioned way, and produced without adding anything extra or unnecessary. The process is simple and direct, and avoids pitfalls found in the commercial production of applesauce.

“[The apples in] most commercial applesauce, like Motts and White House, are steamed,” said Downey. “When they’re cooked, they’re peeled, cored, and then the apples are steamed and run through a tube. When you steam, it loses the flavor, so they add back. They add apple juice and additives to give applesauce the flavor. Our mother wouldn’t combine apples. When our mother made applesauce she would just cook it on the stove in its own juices.”

“That’s where you get that intense apple flavor,” added Goodwin. “We thought it would be fun to do separate apples, so you can get the flavor of that apple. Except for the Fuji Pink.”

“Our theory was: all apples are different, everyone has an apple they like,” said Goodwin. “Why shouldn’t applesauce be different based on the variety of apple?

“We tried to pick older apples, heirloom apples, like Winesap,” said Goodwin. “But a lot of orchards don’t have the older apples, and they don’t have as many as them. We have a problem with getting as many as we would like because a lot of them have been grafted.”

Heirloom Applesauce sells in six Whole Food stores, as well as through online vendors. Though the demand for homestyle applesauce is growing, the sisters haven’t forgotten their roots.

“Our mother made it for her grandchildren a lot, so when they came over to visit her in the mountains she would make them applesauce,” said Goodwin. “When we asked her what she used, she said, ‘Well, I used different apples,’ and that was no help. When we started in about 2011, we started buying from … a woman our mom had been getting apples from for years.”

“We have a house up in the mountains where we started cooking apples,” said Downey. “We cooked over 50-something varieties of apples back then.”

“That was for about two years,” said Goodwin, “Then we set up a kitchen in the garage and we started tasting and testing, and it all depended on texture.

“And it also depended on what tasted good,” contributed Downey. “Mary’s husband Danny would sit in the garage at night, and we would come over with another bowl of applesauce for him and he would say ‘oh, that’s really good.'”

“He would say ‘oh I like that better than the last one!’ Every one was better than the last one! Poor Danny ate more applesauce than you could shake a stick at,” said Goodwin. “My neighbor Beth next door was a diabetic, so she became our sugar-free expert. Mary and I started to sell some through a small shop in Greensboro. But we finally got serious, and went to the Department of Agriculture.”

“When we set up, we were using big pots on the stove and a big pressure cooker,” said Downey. “It was a trip at first because we were driving to get the apples. She had a refrigerator in her garage we were stuffing the apples in. In the winter, we were keeping them in the mountains in my mother’s garage to stay cool. One time we made a trip up north in February to Pennsylvania to get apples and bought back like 60 bushels. Put it in mom’s garage, but it was, like, ten below. Well, luckily our sister was living up there, so she was over there at night putting blankets over the boxes of apples because there was a little heater in the garage, and during the day she would run and take the blankets off.

“In the beginning, we used to try and get all our apples from North Carolina,” said Goodwin. “We would stay in North Carolina when in season, but in February we would have to go to northern Virginia and southern Pennsylvania in the apple country. We started off local, but as we got bigger we had to buy elsewhere for more bushels.”

“This has been a new experience for us,” said Downey. “We revamped the kitchen in 2013, and we stayed cooking up until spring 2015 when our backs began to give out. We needed to find someone who can kettle cook it like we do. We settled with Devine’s, in Elizabethtown, where everything is kettle cooked.

“We really consider applesauce as the lost food to the people, but it’s great as a side dish,” said Goodwin. “We are trying to bring applesauce back.”