Home made apple juice

This time of year is apple season down under. We'd just about run out of apple juice, so on my last field trip I stopped at my favourite fruit orchard to get some juicing apples. These are third grade apples, which we get for about 30 cents a kilo. We got Golden Delicious this time and they actually looked pretty good (these are the pick of them we saved for eating).

So, here's how we do the juice. First we wash the fruit and throw out any bad ones. The we chop any bruises off and chop them into pieces that fit in the juicer. We borrow a Breville Fountain juicer, which is ok for the job. You can pick these up pretty cheap second hand as people use them twice and then can't be bothered cleaning them! It just has a rotating blade which throws juice one way and the rest the other way.

The next stage is to pour the juice into a beer brewing keg. This is a method we use to separate the frothy crap from the juice. The keg has a tap at the bottom, which taps off pure juice, some solids sink to the bottom and the froth stays at the top.

We leave the juice to settle a while and get on cleaning the jars and lids to preserve the juice. We use Vacola number 27's for juice. Pour off the juice through a sieve and funnel into the jars.

Then you just put the rings on, then lids and then clips. 

Now you're ready to preserve. Just place the jars in the bioler and cook 'em up. We have an electric, which takes an hour and an old stove top one which you need to bring to 92 degrees and keep there for an hour. The electric holds 7 jars and Big Bertha holds 12.

The waste can either go to the chooks, worms or compost.

Once they're ready you just remove them and leave them overnight before removing the clips. The juice will keep for years like this.

In the end we got 21 jars of 800ml, or 17 litres of juice (we normally mix it 50/50 with water to drink since it's so sweet). It cost $10 for 30kg of fruit, plus about 25 cents for power. I know what you're thinking, how bloody long did it take. Well, I reckon all up it took about 3 hours. It probably doesn't save us much money, but it does cut our food miles a lot. We actually haven't bought shop juice for over two years now. And of course it tastes delicious.