Tag: juicing

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.

May 7, 2024 – Will It Juice?

May 7, 2024 /

When you start to get some age on you, unfortunately some people we once new are no longer with us. Also some people that we know are also survivors. In this case, one of my wife’s friends is a cancer survivor and she said that juicing was a key part of her treatment process. The first couple of weeks she brought some juice by and then she bought my wife her own juicer.

This is a nice piece of equipment. It is Breville which means that it is pretty high dollar (and well made). My first thought is where is this going to be stored? Then looking at it a little more, how much of a pain in the butt is this going to be to clean? It is my opinion that a healthy life tips the balance more towards a diet of whole foods. I think juicing is a short cut in a sense, but it certainly must be better drinking things that came from a can or bottle.

Putting my reservations aside, my wife wanted to use it so I set out to find some recipes to try. I found two that were advertised as ‘Energy’ and ‘Anti-Cancer’ so that is what I set about to do. Will it juice?

These recipes are for one batch which seems to produce about a cup worth of juice. The first one is Energy.

  • 1 stalk celery
  • 1 apple
  • 1 lemon
  • 4 leaves of kale
  • 1/2 cucumber
  • 1 inch of peeled ginger

The second one is cancer fighting.

  • 2 carrots
  • 4 stalks celery
  • 1 lemon
  • 1/4 head of cabbage

This is the output of the second one. Once everything is stirred together it is a very vibrant orange. Left to its own devices, it will separate again in about a day. It appears that a very fine degree of solids is allowed to pass through the screen and those solids float to the top.

I tasted both of them. Neither were bad. I have to say that the green grass taste of the ‘Energy’ was less appealing, but not horrible. I could see having a glass of this every breakfast or something like that. I would probably want to try some other recipes to find what I really like. There were some recipes that contained rhubarb and that stuff grows like a weed from my plants. It seems like a good strategy when gardens start to become prolific.

I made a couple of batches with the thought that they might last the week. I have to say committing to this uses a lot of produce. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Some might say it is the point of juicing. Just be prepared that finding a steady stream of vegetables are going to have a financial impact.

After trying things, there are still two downsides. The first is to find a home for this machine. I don’t want it living on the counter for the rest of my life. The second is cleaning. The catch barely holds a double batch and there are a lot of parts to wash. The filter screen has to be scrubbed because the fine fiber tends to plug the screen with each use. It definitely takes more time to clean than to use. Not ideal. There is a fair amount of waste generated. This makes excellent compost fodder or even chicken food. Since I have neither at the moment, I feel bad about throwing it out. But beware, you will have to deal with that as well.

End Your Programming Routine: Will I ever become a juicer? Probably not. I could definitely see making some custom Bloody Mary mix though. Think about it, the possibilities are almost endless. I am committed to making juice while my wife goes through treatment. I am going to sneak in a few things that I want to try while I am going through the effort to do this. I have to say that it is kind of fun and amazing to see the amount of water in celery.

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.