Make your own juices - here's how

Summer and fall is the time of the fruit harvest. The trees are full of apples, pears, plums etc. But what to do when the fruit basket is overflowing? One way to process your fruit is to make your own juice from it. Basically, you can process any fruit into juice by pressing it. Ripe cherries, apples, berries, pears, peaches and grapes are best suited.

Cold dejuicing

In cold juicing, the fruit is processed into juice in its raw state. This preserves important enzymes, vitamins and other nutrients. There are two ways to do this. You can make the juice with a juicer in which the fruit is juiced using a screw press or with an electric juicer in which the fruit is ground up and juiced using centrifugal force.
A small disadvantage here is that the juice can only be kept in the fridge for a few days as it is particularly susceptible to germ formation and fermentation. However, the juice can be kept for longer by heating it in a pan to 75 to 85 °C for five to ten minutes and then pouring it into sterilized bottles up to just below the rim. When the containers cool down, a vacuum is created and the contents can then be preserved.

Hot juicing

There are two different options here.

In the steam juicer:
It looks like a large cooking pot from the outside but consists of several inserts. The bottom pot is filled with water, followed by a pot with a filling tube and a perforated basket with the fruit. The boiling process causes the hot steam to rise to the top and burst the fruit so that the juice escapes. The juice can then be poured directly into the bottles via the filling tube. This method is particularly suitable for berries and stone fruit, as there is no need to remove the seeds. The juicing time from the point at which the water boils is around 30 minutes for berries and around one hour for firm fruit such as pears or apples.

In the cooking pot:
First wash the fruit, cut into small pieces and place in the pot of water. The water should be about 1/5 of the amount of fruit. Now bring the contents of the pan to the boil with the lid on and reduce the heat as soon as it boils. After about 25 minutes, the contents will have reduced to a puree and the pan can be removed from the heat and the puree strained through a cloth. The juice will keep for a long time, but has lost some of its vitamins and nutrients due to the heat.

Apple juice recipe:

Wash 3 kg of apples thoroughly, remove the rotten parts and cut into small pieces. Place them in a pan with 1 liter of water, bring to the boil and simmer with the lid on until soft. Then strain the entire cooked product through a cloth and squeeze out the remains well. Heat the juice again briefly to 80 °C and then it can be bottled.

You can find all products for juicing here: Fruit mills, fruit presses and juicers and co.