I've been wanting to make apple juice and cider from our apples here at Struan Farm for awhile now, especially after attending the Wakefield Heritage Apple Fair outside of Nelson last year. Each year in autumn members of the local community bring their apple harvests to a gathering where they can have them juiced. Juice is also available for purchase, along with trees and fruit. It's a celebration of all things apple, a fantastic idea really.
You know me, I've since been trying to figure out how we might do something like that at home. I'd found some apple presses for sale but they were quite expensive. Too expensive for something that could end up being a passing fancy on Karen's part. But recently I found a small 6L press on www.fishpond.co.nz for a reasonable price. (I'd provide you with a link, but the one that I bought from the UK is now unavailable. Similar ones are listed for sale by different companies.)
And so the juicing experiments began. I recruited John as my able assistant. Our first experiment was just that.
We didn't get much juice, but what we did press tasted quite good. The instructions said to cut the apples into 2 cm. pieces, but I've since been advised that it's better to pop them into the food processor to pulp them, resulting in much more juice. The Apple Fair had motorised crushers that mulched the fruit, which is how this is done in real volume.
Our second attempt involved Jack Humm crabapples. I'd planted the trees to help with pollinating our apple trees, not for the fruit, but it seems silly to have the fruit go to waste. Our friends at Country Trading had suggested that they make good juice, so I thought we'd test that out.
This time we deployed the food processor to mulch the fruit before pressing, to great success.
We ended up with two big pitchers of crabapple juice. While the juice on its own is good, it's slightly astringent as you might expect. I added a bit of Struan Farm honey to it and MAGIC! This was a winner. Next we'll go back to the apples, processing them in the food processor first to see if that improves the quantity of juice. I'm sure it will.
These juicing experiments triggered memories of my award winning sixth grade school science fair project: "How Does Fermentation Occur?" In the interest of scientific research, I put apple juice in bottles in the cellar, blowing the lids off several, as I analysed and documented what happens to apple juice as it ferments. It was probably a bit unusual for a grade school student to consider this question, but then that would be me.
Almost fifty years later my earlier experimentation with apple juice might come in handy. Maybe we'll give cider a try next?
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