I’m attempting to make my own applesauce/apple butter/etc and most of the recipes I have looked through talk about bushels. Now, I grew up on a farm and still don’t really know what a bushel is.
I’m not too concerned about it for this canning session (I have two five gallon buckets full of apples and if that is not enough to get something out of, I quit) but would like to know for future pickings.
Can I measure a bushel of something by 5-gallon buckets or is it by pounds?
3 Answers
A “bushel is a dry volume of weight equal to 8 gallons”
A bushel is an imperial and U.S. customary unit of dry volume, equivalent in each of these systems to 4 pecks or 8 gallons (9.31 U.S. liquid gallons). It is used for volumes of dry commodities (not liquids), most often in agriculture. It is abbreviated as bsh. or bu. In modern usage, the dry volume is usually only nominal, with bushels referring to standard weights instead.
This picture will give you a MUCH better idea of “how much what holds”: Sometimes trying to wrap your head around a measurement is pretty impossible LOL
Gallons Per Bushel
Love this stuff. Your two buckets are plenty. The recipes your looking at are older grandma type and generally speak to method not measurements. A bushel of apples means about that much. 8 gallons is right but who knows how big (less apple and less weight) or small (more apples possibly more weight) the recipe is talking about. When we pick apples, a bucket each with two picking, those two buckets would fill one of those big woven apple baskets to overflowing. Apple growers sell these as a bushel. I have the church type cookbooks that mom collected from the 40s-60s and there is one constant theme. Those ladies knew how to cook and spoke/wrote in recipe shorthand.