Homemade Fresh Apple Juice
We’re lucky enough to have two large apple trees in our garden. One is a cooking apple tree and the other is an eating apple tree. I’m not actually sure what variety they are but the apples taste good.
The trees produce a good crop of fruit each year and when we’ve had our fill of eating apple, apple crumble and other apple related desserts we use the surplus to make fresh apple juice. Mr J has also been known to make a batch or two of cider as well.
The great thing with making apple juice is that you can use the surplus apples and especially the windfalls which might not be quite good enough for cooking with or eating so none of them go to waste.
And, the boys love fresh apple juice so that’s even more reason to make it.
How to make fresh homemade Apple juice
A few years ago, I bought Mr J a small fruit press for a Christmas present and it’s perfect for making fresh homemade apple juice.
It’s a really simple process to extract the juice:
- Cut the apples up into small pieces
- If you can pulp / crush the fruit, you’ll extract more juice easily. Mr J has an attachment that fits onto his drill to chop them fruit up, it’s a bit like a giant blender.
- Line the fruit press with a muslin, helps to filter the juice
- Add the pulped fruit to the fruit press and place the blocks on top
- Start pressing and you’ll see the juice start to flow.
It’s as easy as that. Well it’s that easy if you have your own juice press.
If you don’t have a juice press but have an excess of apples check to see if any local farm shops have a juice press as there are now quite a few places that you can take your apples to to get them pressed. Check this one out at Drovers Hill Farm in Buckinghamshire or have a look to see if there are any local community projects that offer a similar service.
Apple juice will only last a couple of days in the fridge. If you don’t want to pasteurise it then the easiest way to store it is to freeze it. Or, you could also try your hand at making some cider.
