Tag: grape juice

October 24, 2024 – Another Grape Juice Method

October 24, 2024 /

This is another thing that I have been procrastinating this year. I cannot believe the yield of grapes this year. Now, I am almost at the end of the season. I should have done something with the grapes a month ago. The same malaise that is effecting my writing is also afflicting my chores around the house.

It gets to be after dinner time and I have lost motivation to do anything. Part of it is I know that I should be training but it is dark or cold or raining and so I sit on the bed and scroll through the news while my wife watches TV. It is ‘just a break’ that turns into ‘too late to start anything’. I know some of it is seasonal, I also take it as a sign that I need some rest. But really, I can’t afford to check out after dinner.

This is the forth different iteration of juicing hat I have tried. Year one I used inexpensive crank juicer. It worked well but it plugged up the screen something fierce. I would take hours of trying to get all of the fibers out the screen. The next year I tried the cider press. That worked pretty well but it required hours of machinery cleanup. The third year, I tried steaming. This was OK, but I really didn’t want to cook the grapes. This year, I thought I would try the juicer.

I know that wineries just crush the grapes, stems, good and bad ones. The fermentation process is a preservative method. I don’t like the thought of raw bird poop in my juice. I pick out the bad ones and wash the clusters. Then I destem all of the good ones to put in the juicer. Washing the grapes is a step that I do for all of my juicing by the way. In fact, this is the amount of prep I would do for the old juicer too but not for pressing or steaming. Get settled in for a long evening.

I found the Breville juicer to be the easiest to clean up of the methods that I have tried. Nothing got plugged. It was like washing a food processor, lots of plastic parts and some sharp ones. My observation of the leftover pulp was that it wasn’t very effective. It is amazing that two sticks of celery can yield half a cup of juice but a gallon of grapes was about 16oz.

The juice itself was probably the lightest I have tasted. I suspect that has to do with the overall yield plus the amount of air that is whipped into the process as the liquid is centrifuged from the solids. There was a fair amount of striation of the resultant liquid. This indicates that for pure juice, you would want to let things separate and skim the lighter level off.

Based on the four methods I have tried, the one that has the least amount of prep as well as best yield is the steam method. You cannot underestimate how much effort is required to prep and clean. The product was so-so by comparison, but it beats going to waste because you don’t want to deal with it. I would use the Breville if I was dealing with a small amount of grapes, like making a daily juice due to easiest cleanup. Ultimately, it is too much work and too much loss to make this a primary method.

End Your Programming Routine: Experimenting is in my nature. It is why I studied science in the first place. It is a real shame that I am going to let so much of a bounteous crop go to waste. But, we have plenty of grape jelly and it doesn’t make good wine even though I have made plenty of it. I guess that is why our modern food system is kind of marvelous. It takes hours of work and distills the result down to a couple of dollars. It doesn’t pay for my efforts, only as a labor of love.

October 4, 2023 – Grape Juice, Method 3

October 4, 2023 /

This was not just a good year for apples but also for grapes. I got plenty of Concord grapes which best use is for juice. I have made wine with it before but the criticism for this wine is ‘grapy’. I concur. If I was to make wine with it, then I would probably use it for mulled wine or cooking. It is really not a sit down and have a glass situation.

If you recall last year, I attempted to use the apple press to squeeze the juice out. That worked, but it also required a lot of cleanup. Several years before, I used the Norpro Juicer. That worked as well but it sure packed the skins into the screen and required multiple stop and clean out operations. I stack rank the apple press over the Norpro but I want something better.

I did do some research on other options. Results I got that I am sort of loathe to try were to put the grapes in a blender or use a potato masher. I decided to try a third option. This was a light simmer.

The knock against this method is that heat potentially kills beneficial compounds found in the raw grape. If you were going to can the juice or make jelly, I don’t think you should give it a second thought. You have to heat those anyway to do those forms of preservation. My plan is really just to make juice to drink, but I am more interested in how easy and the mess factor that is involved rather that the nutrition nuances. Lets face it, if the option is less nutritious juice or letting them whither on the vine, you can guess where I come down on that decision.

Like all food processing, I start with cleaning and grading. I want to remove all of the split, moldy grapes as well as the insects that came around for the ride. Truthfully, if I am going to heat an pasteurize everything it probably really isn’t necessary but the thought of bird poop in my juice is quite a turn off.

I decided to de-stem all of my grapes. The reason that I did so was to give extra quality control. It allowed me to observe which grapes I was selecting. That being said, this took quite a bit of time. If I was truly looking for the simple button, then I would throw the whole cluster in the pot.

I turned the pot on medium low and set about to prepare dinner. Once the bottom layer started boiling I kept turning down the heat. I was trying to minimize the amount of heating, but I was doing other things so it was a low effort operation. I would say it was on the stove thirty minutes and probably simmering for twenty.

What you see in the picture was about a quarter of a 5 gallon bucket of grapes. That yielded about 1 quart of juice in this method. This took me about 30 minutes to prep and about another 30 minutes of filtration and clean-up. Still a lot of work.

I only juiced part of my grapes in this test. The next thing that I am going to do is try different levels of filtration. I used a hop bag to do this and it was too fine resulting in a lot of squeezing and manual manipulation. I think that it will be faster to do a two step filtration. An initial coarse filtration for the first press followed by a fine filtration for the finished juice. Of coarse, that will make more clean-up work, but I am hoping that the there is less clean-up time than squeezing time.

End Your Programming Routine: I am no juice connoisseur, but it tastes pretty good to me. My observation of the wine industry is that it takes a lot less care and handling with the grapes than I did for the juice. The reason is that it is too labor intensive to do what I did. That being said, don’t worry it will be fine. If you choose not to process your grapes, I wouldn’t blame you either.

October 18, 2022 – Will it Juice?

October 18, 2022 /

For a while, there was an schtick about ‘Will it Blend?‘. It was a marketing campaign for Blendtec, blending all kinds of things in there product. Some of it was pretty impressive. I set out to find out if my new to me apple press would press grapes to make grape juice.

I do have a device that is marketed as a ‘juicer’ and it does work. However, with grapes that have skins on them, this device plugs quickly and hard. The last time I made grape juice, I spent several hours cleaning it. I also had to disassemble frequently just to keep it going. I know traditionally, grape juice could be made by stepping on the grapes, I don’t see why an apple press wont do the same thing. So this is what I set out to do, plus, I want to use it.

Because I have been both lazy and busy, I haven’t done as much preserving as I should. Admittedly, a lot of blueberries and raspberries went to waste while I was focused on the siding repair. We are nearly out of jam as we haven’t done any in several years, this year I think I will make grape. I do know that this is one of the least popular choices in my house but we have it, so lets use it.

It’s hard to compare yields and efficiencies because I don’t have a lot of baseline to compare but I got about a quart of juice from roughly 3 gallons of grapes. Looking at the jelly recipe, only 2 3/4 cup of juice is required to make a batch, which is 7 cups yield. I will probably at least double it.

As coincidence would have it, the guy I bought the press from stopped by the day I was trying this. He said absolutely they have used it for juicing. Now, I had no fears, I just needed to figure out how it worked.

The truth is, it was a lot of work for a little yield. That being said, I am happy that my grapes didn’t go to waste. I got enough juice to make some jelly so that is something. I am planning to get going with apple pressing soon. I am running out of time to do this as well.

End Your Programming Routine: It has been a long held dream to have an apple press. Now, I need to get some use out of it. This may not be the best ‘production model’, but just like I keep talking about, I cant get caught up in the ‘toolbox fallacy’. Let me get some use out of it and figure out what I like and don’t like, then I can upgrade.