Is anyone here making apple cider at home? I mean the cold pressed apple juice and not the fermented hard cider, which people here in Finland call as cider.
Years ago we planted an old field full of apple trees (48 trees planted, but some did not survive). Now those are finally starting to produce, so we got plenty of apples. There are places here which process the apples to cold pressed juice, but we do not have any really close to our house and usually the places are quite busy, so it is difficult to get the time reserved and get the apples picked at the prime time and transported to the processing place. Since we like to do things ourselves, I purchased this old fashioned manual juice press. It arrived yesterday and right away after work we had to test it.
We grated the apples with the grating implement of my old Bosch universal mixer and filled the basket to press the juice. I was amazed how easy it was to squeeze the juice out. We used mixture of sweet and tart apples and the juice was perfect. Here is a link to a video of the pressing.
https://youtu.be/T0EFuelA9lE
Since we got more juice than we can drink I heated the juice in a kettle in water bath to 80°C to kill yeasts and bacteria and filled 3 liter box bags with it. It would be nice to have similar pasteurizing equipment like those processing places, but now I am experimenting this with the normal pans and pots.
Sari