Apple Juice 🍎 Traditional

Hello, everyone! 📷 😎

Unlike the last four years, this year there was a good apple harvest. Every time this happens, we make apple juice from them. Around the same time, late October. The last time we did it was five years ago.

The preparation of apple juice here always follows the same procedure - my grandparents, my parents, and now my family and I. That's why I wrote traditional - first picking, then grinding, finally pressing. Only the people and the means we use to do it change :)

I documented the whole process with photos, yes, I always have my phone in my pocket, no matter what I'm doing.
So this post is also a photo blog about the activity I was most involved in last month.

🍏 📷 😎 📷 🍎

We have an orchard with apple trees at my mother's house. This year, after five years, they were full of fruit, and it took my son and me a week, every afternoon for a few hours, to pick these apples.

In the end, quite a few of these apples were collected.
Let me also say that in our orchard, there are at most two types of apples, the so-called 'Bobovec' and 'Briner', which are sweet and sour, more suitable for juice, strudels, and pies. They're not pretty to look at, and they don't shine like the ones in stores.

My rough estimate is that there were about 600 kilos of apples.

As I mentioned, my son and I spent five days picking, and last Saturday we made the juice. This required some preparation.
First of all, we bought a new fruit grinder. The previous one, which my late father had commissioned fifty years ago, was already too old, and the electric motor no longer started.

Unboxing the new fruit grinder:

Much smaller and lighter than the old one, but at € 750.00, the price is relatively high.

Next, we had to prepare a place to grind and press the apples - the garage of our grandmother's house, which is now full of all sorts of stuff.

And then we started grinding and pressing.

The process is always the same.

First, we pick the apples again (because they constantly rot, they are not the most durable) and wash them.

Then they go to the grinder, where they are ground into pulp.

This pulp is white, but like peeled apples, it oxidizes very quickly in the air and turns brown. This is a natural process; there is nothing wrong with it.

Now the pulp goes into the press, where it is pressed and the juice is extracted. Our press is old, 50 years or more, and it was only when we started pushing that I noticed it was not suitable for such fine pulp, because a lot of it sticks out.

In addition to the mill/grinder/whatever, I should have bought a new press, but prices for galvanized presses start at €1000, and I wasn't ready to pay that much. After all, we're not a juice factory; the juice is only for the family, not for sale. The mill I bought was already oversized, and the pulp was too delicate.
That's how it is when I listen to others! :(

I had to find another solution, actually, an improvisation: I added a plastic mesh to the press to prevent the pulp from splashing out.

But then it was OK.

We were grinding and juicing from morning till night, the whole family. We squeezed about 150 liters of juice, which went into a green barrel.
We will drink it until it ferments, which usually happens in a week. Maybe I will try to make cider, and what is left will turn into apple cider vinegar in a couple of years.

We pasteurized 50 liters (read: boiled between 90-100 degrees Celsius) and poured the hot juice into plastic bags. This juice doesn't spoil and stays sweet all year long. We'll see.