Tag Archives: Apple juice

Children, Food, Growing, Preserving, Produce, Weather

Harvest 2018

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You may have noticed that we’ve been rather quiet over the last few months. As my due date got closer I really went into nesting and birth preparation mode. It was quite odd seeing the different fruits come into season and not harvesting them. August should have been filled with harvesting and preserving but instead instead it saw me growing in size, decreasing in mobility, organising and reading. I have to admit to feeling a bit jealous of everyone else’s harvest posts, and even my own from previous years.

We did manage to harvest a little from the land, the beauty of bath apples were first, the wasps got to a fair few but we still got a few bottles of juice from them. We harvested, quartered, froze and then juiced when we had time (and my nephew’s help). It worked well.

Pressing apples after defrosting. You certainly get more juice.

The tomatoes were next, not as good a harvest as last year by far, we lost a lot, especially the cherry tomatoes, but we did get a few jars of passata. I also finally processed the last of last year’s toms so my passata stores are looking healthy again.

We had our first experience of blossom end rot with the toms. This was our first year with raised beds but also our first heat wave year. I am hoping that if we add some more nutrients to the soil and keep steady with our watering next year, then we won’t see it again.

One thing that benefited from the heat wave was our attempt at melons. We got a few good size, really tasty cantaloupe melons. I’m really keen to try these again and see what we get when we put some effort in to them. We got a couple aubergines and sweet peppers too.

One of our tasty melons

We lost a lot of the cooking apples and pears as well. The apples were a smaller harvest anyway as one tree barely fruited but the pear trees were laden. We did manage to have our first attempt at pear juice and have enough harvested Williams pears to do some dried pear.

It was a good year for pears

We always knew this year wouldn’t be great in terms of the smallholding, my body doesn’t do pregnancy well and we ended up with an emergency C-section which put me out of action for far longer than I had hoped. We had a go at planting, harvesting and preserving but kept our expectations low.

On the upside we now have our not so little boy. I have just about recovered from the section enough to get back to work on the smallholding. It’s been a little forced as Sam broke his foot last week. It does feel good to be back to doing lots (when baby allows of course) and I’m feeling very motivated to get this place back on track.

Baby’s first trip to the polytunnel.

Dans

As always likes and comments are much appreciated. We have a new Instagram account for all the day to day posts, we are @six_oaks_smallholding

Food, Preserving, Produce

Pressing frozen apples

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We’re having a bit of a freezer crisis at the moment. We’ve got quite a lot of home grown fruit, veg and meat in the freezers now, as well as some bought in pork from other smallholders. This means that we are nearing capacity, which of course is brilliant, if I can get sorted with using what is inside then it will really lower our food costs and is in tune with the whole reason for this smallholding, eating home grown produce. We did really well at getting on with the preserving last year, apple sauce, apple and cucumber chutney, lots of jams, passatas, apple juice and wine etc but the freezers are still quite full.

I’m pregnant and due in August, that means that during our peak harvest of fruit and veg and when we shall be getting hogget and possibly mutton back from the butchers I be either heavily pregnant or dealing with a newborn. I’m not sure how productive I will be in the kitchen, but given the state of my hips currently I think it’s a good idea to bet on me not doing much at all. So what will we do with all the produce? Wash, chop and shove in the freezer of course! Then, when baby is older I can start working through it. The issue is there is no space for a summer’s worth of produce at the moment, so I need to get clearing while I still can.

That brings me to this post, and hopefully a few more along the same lines in the coming months. Emptying the freezers and turning the contents into tasty and in some cases, long lasting, foods. We kicked off this process this week with the immanent arrival of 3 geese and 2 chickens for the chest freezer. At the end of last year we were drowning in apples and, after contacting Vigo Presses, I washed, chopped and frozen 2 builders buckets of cooking apples. Just straight in the freezer with some cling film over the top. These came out along with a small bag of Beauty of Bath apples. We popped them in an empty fridge to defrost for a couple days and dusted off the apple press.

Vigo had suggested that if doing the apples from frozen we may benefit from a mesh bag to put the crushed pieces into inside the press. I can’t remember what stopped me from buying it at the time but I am guessing eventually the tab got closed on my computer and it got forgotten about. I’m not sure we actually needed to crush the apples, they pretty much turned to a mush despite still being a little frozen.

We then got to the pressing stage and soon realised the reasoning behind needing the mesh bag. A fair amount of the apple just squeezed through the press and we even got some spurting. It was certainly going to be a cloudy apple juice. As we couldn’t press it too much the mush ended up being quite wet at the end, much wetter than we would have liked so a lot of juice remained in it. If we had the bag we could have probably gotten it a lot drier and gotten more juice.

We took the juice inside and poured it through a small colander into a pot, we had about 10 pints of juice. We left it to sit for a while as I was feeling a bit broken by the point but I’m glad we did. When I went back to it there was quite a bit of frothy scum that had risen to the top. We had this with our first batch of juice and Vigo had said then that letting it stand may reduce that. I scooped off the scum and bottled the juice.

It went into the pasteuriser which had been filled with cold water and set to 75°C for 25 mins. We sat down to watch TV and forgot about it so it had long been done by the time I remembered. The bottles were still too hot to touch though. Being so hot for so long may have affected the flavour but hopefully not, we haven’t opened a bottle yet although we did taste some freshly pressed juice which was lovely. I used our nifty grabby tool to get the bottles out, tightened the caps and lay them on their sides. There is still quite a lot of scum so I think we will leave the juice to stand for longer next time. The juice is also quite dark after pasteurising but this time I didn’t bother with ascorbic acid or citric acid, the juice tastes fine as is and I just didn’t feel like adding extra things in just for aesthetics.

Just to pop labels on them and drink them in the next 1-2 years. A learning experience to be sure, but we now know we can juice from frozen apples and have some ideas on how to improve the process. As a bonus it made just enough space for the geese and chickens which went into the freezer the next afternoon.

Dans

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Preserving

Apple pressing

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Sam and I decided to forgo the usual exchange of christmas presents and put the money we would spend towards something useful. In the black friday sales we went all out on some juicing equipment from Vigo Press. We bought a Classic Crusher A, a 20 litre press and a stainless steel pasturiser. Just before Christmas we decided to try it out. We gathered the last of the apples from the trees, eating and cooking and gave it a go.

We had about 20kg of apples and set up a little production line. We gave the apples a quick rinse in a tub of water, quartered them (cutting away and bruised or bad bits) and put them in the crusher.

The production line (and little helper loading the crusher)

We ran them through that once, in batches of 10kg, the crusher was really easy to use, so easy a child could do it. Chi had a great time putting the apples in and even turning the crusher.

We then used the press, that was a bit more complicated. We didn’t secure the press and I think that next time we will bolt it to a pallet or something. We ended up having to have one person hold it whilst the other wound it to press the fruit. I didn’t get any pictures of this step though, I will do next time.

We had a stainless steel pot underneath to collect the juice. Chi was very happy to have a taste of the juice fresh from the press! We added some citric acid in the hope that it would stop browning. It didn’t, after talking to the staff at Vigo Press they suggested using ascorbic acid at 0.5g/litre, I think we will try that next time.

The first taste

We didn’t end up with as much juice as I had hoped for, about 8 750ml bottles. Again Vigo Press advised that we could try running the apples through the crusher twice and we shall definately be trying that next time. The pressed apples weren’t as dry as I had been expecting them to be so I think we could have gotten more liquid from them. They did make a nice treat for the geese and chickens though.

We pasturised the juice and I was very happy to see that it did lighten in colour, so it wasn’t so brown. The only issue we had was that some scum appeared at the neck of the bottle. We might get less of this if we use a mesh bag in the press to stop bits and pieces coming through. But Vigo Press suggested leaving in a sealed container overnight and then pasturising, so that’s another option.

In the pasturiser

The juice tasted really nice, and although we only got 8 bottles we are managing to save them for special occassions. I am really looking forward to 2017, we will keep more apples this year as I had been getting rid of any with even small blemishes. I can see some nice family days pressing apples, it’s a great family activity. And I’m looking forward to trying it with pears and with trying to make some wine with the juices. Yep, very excited to get more use out of this equipment!

Finished product (and wonky label)

Dans

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