I'm Carolyn Washburn with Utah State University Extension in Washington County.
I'm the family consumer science agent and one of the areas of my focus is home
food preservation.
It's certainly enjoyable for families to preserve their own food. Especially if
they've grown them and harvested them and then to put them away to use for, for
days during the winter.
Today we're going to be talking about making juice and putting it away or using
it into jam or a jelly or even just bottling juice. There are a lot of
ways, a few ways anyway, that we can make juice. Some these are tools from
ages past. You may remember putting your, cooking your, vege-- your fruit down and
running it through a colander. And then if you wanted it really nice and finely
strained, you would run it through gauze cloth. You might have even just used a
strainer. And those methods worked quite well and they still work well today if
that's what you have. Some of these methods, when you use them, may give you
a little bit of residue on the bottle of your jars of juice. And that certainly
isn't harmful, it's just certainly a personal preference. But today we're
going to be juicing these beautiful grapes in the steam juicer. Now do not confuse
this with a steam canner that USDA does not recommend and approve for use for
home canning. This is simply a juicer to get the juice out of my fruits. It's
a wonderful pan, it's so very, very easy to use, it takes a little bit of time.
I started by putting on the stove, the bottom pan of my juicer. It is my water,
it holds my water and I want to always make sure that I have it full enough of
water that it isn't going to run out and burn the bottom of my pan. And then I
watch that too because this is something that I can cook on high or medium-high.
And then I'm going to go ahead and put the rest of the pan together on the stove.
This pan is going to collect the juice, and as I put it on the spicket fits right
in a little hole that's been designed for it and hangs over the top. My basket,
which is going to hold my fruit. I simply rinsed this fruit [clang] and get ready to
cook it. I didn't cut it up, I didn't seed it, I didn't take it off the stems, all I
did was rinsed it well. Now I could do the same thing with different fruits. A
wonderful thing to do with pomegranates, I would simply take and score it, cut the
bottom off, pop it apart a little bit, throw that in. I might want to do same
thing with apples. I wouldn't have to peel them, I don't need to take the cores
out of them. I would probably half them or quarter them, so they would cook a little
faster. This is wonderful with prickly pear cactus'. One of the things people
are liking to do in Washington County is make cactus jam and jelly. And this is
a great little tool for that. So now I'm going to put my lid on. I'm going to sit
this right down inside the juice and I'm going to turn it on high or medium-high
and it's going to be cooking for, probably half an hour before I start to get juice
coming out of it. Now as the juice comes out, it's going to start to come down
through the hose that's clamped off right now, so nothing's going to drip.
And then we'll start collecting it.
Now as any product we make from USDA, even though the juice is hot and comes out
of the juicer, nice and hot and steamy, we're still going to process it in a water
bath canner. It will only take about ten minutes to process but that is to be sure
that we destroy any types of mold or bacteria. Now we don't have to use a
pressure canner on juice and jam and jellies because they are a high acidity
food. They come up in the top part of our pH charts showing us that it has lots of
acid in. But I am going to encourage you to make sure you do process these foods
in a water bath canner for the amount of time specified. The juice, rather you can
it as a juice or if you turn it into a jam and jelly, those are going to need to be
processed. And we'll be talking about those in a little bit as our juice starts
coming out and is ready to use. I do need my tools with me today. I need
a funnel. This is one of the new funnels on the market. Easy to store because it
does collapse. I'm going to need my jar lifter to get my hot jars out of my
canner. Just my water here. And today I'm going to be using jars that have been
sterilized. And they will be sterilized in boiling
water as I bring them out. Because I'm only going to be
cooking them ten minutes in a water bath canner. So I want to make sure my juice is
hot and that my, my jar is sitting in sterilized water, keeping hot, ready to
use.
I will have my jar lifter ready to get my lid out of the pot of water. I don't have
to boil my lids but I will be putting them in boiling water and then simmering them
keeping them nice and warm, ready to put on my jar of juice. I don't boil them
because that will make them too soft and they won't have a good seal. Lids are made
just a little bit differently anymore. They have a coating on that won't put
quite as much acid, or that the acid won't eat off and turn it black with little
spots that people often worry about. So they're a little bit different but I don't
boil them and I never cinch them up hard. I just finger cinch, just finger tight
them on the jars ready to go. [clank]
Some of the products that I can make out of my juice, once I get it coming is
of course I can just simply bottle, bottle it as juice and have some wonderful grape
juice for breakfast or lunch. But I can also make my jams out of my homemade
grapes. And jelly makes wonderful this is [audio pause]
jelly, I can go ahead and mix those. I will be using jams and jellies with
pectins. Or, if I didn't use a pectin I could go ahead and cook it down but
cooking it down would take a long time with just the juice for a jelly. There are
fun jars out there to make your jams and jellies in and they are certainly great
gifts to give to your neighbors or seasonal holiday's and birthday's or just
to put on your shelf for your family.
Always make sure that you're going to use an approved jar. These jars are,
[clears throat] they're mason jars, they can be Ball, they may be Kerr. They may
be Better Homes and Gardens but you want to make sure that their not just old
mayonnaise jars or some jars that have been used for other things. Now I can
use these jars and reuse them many, many times as long as there are no chips on
them. As long as they've been washed and well cared for, they're going to last me
a lot of years. But when they get a chip in them, then I'm going to just, have to
discard it because I want to make sure that this has a perfect seal on when it
seals. Always use an approved jar. The others would possibly break when you put
them in to the hot water and you certainly want good product.
You can tell these jars have been stored without the rings on because when I'm
ready to put them away on the shelf, that's how I store them. Without the rings
that way, I don't have to work hard on getting my rings off, they don't rust on
and also if my jam happened to unseal, sometimes there's enough sticky underneath
it, that if it had a ring on, it would reseal down. However, the vacuum has now
been broken and bacteria could grow in it, and I wouldn't know it. So with keeping
that ring off, it would just slip off and I would know it.
I always water bath my jams and jellies and juice to kill the mold and bacteria.
You know, in old days, if we opened a jam, a jar of jam and it had mold on, we
simply, scooped the mold off and ate the jam. But if there's mold on top, there's
going to be mold spores down inside. And more allergies, people have issues with
mold and we just don't want to eat it, it isn't healthy for us. So, if we haven't
sealed it properly, and water bathed it, we could have mold grow on it and that's
certainly is something that we don't want on our nice finished product.
So now, we've got our [mic drop] [mic rustle]
[Man in background] Slow down. [Carolyn] Okay.
So now we have our grapes in our pot. We're going to just let them cook. We'll
be, keep watching them, make sure the water keeps nice and full and it will.
There's plenty of water in that to cook for these grapes to go ahead and juice
down. Now once I take the juice out, all I have left is a compost product. I have
the peels, the seeds, the stems which I can simply throw away or a lot of people
like to collect that and use it as compost in their gardens, feed their animals. So
you still have a byproduct, but it isn't anything that we can with and it's
certainly made it easy. I'm not going to use a juicer or strainer, it's going to
just come out as a beautiful clear juice ready to bottle or make into a jelly.
We've been having our grapes on the stove cooking and extracting the juice for about
forty minutes. And a pot full of grapes could take forty minutes to an hour and
if you kept putting other in, it could take even a little bit longer. But we're
going to go ahead and show you know how you take it out of the pot and get ready
to go ahead and process it in a jar but you can see that my juice has started to
come down through my tube and I simply take some type of a container that will
catch it and we'll just do a little bit now to get it coming out.
[liquid filling]
You can see that it is coming out very hot.
And often times people think, "Well that's hot enough that I don't need to go ahead
and process it." But you certainly do. Remember, you always want to process that
juice. So, I would get it, nice when I have enough I could go ahead and make
this into a jelly or if I'm simply going to bottle it, remember I've had my jars
in boiling hot water. To keep them hot and sterilized because the hot juice is going
to be going into it. And I'm going to bring my hot ju-- my boiling hot steaming
jar over. And I can simply begin to fill it with my juice. [liquid filling]
Not quite enough so I need to come back to my, pot. [jingling]
And I might even find it that sometimes I have to tip it a little bit to get
enough out of it. [hose jingling]
[juice pouring] [hose jingle]
And when I get my jar, totally full, giving it just a fourth of an inch head
space, so then I can go ahead and put my lid that's been in boiled water just
simmering on and we'll get ready to
[paper towel rip] [faucet running]
As with anything that I can, I'm going to go ahead and make sure that I clean
the top off very, very good.
And I want just a tiny bit more into [hose jingling]
[juice pouring]
I wipe it with a wet cloth then I use a dry one to make sure that I'm getting rid
of any juice that could be left on the jar. With my lid wand, [lids jumbled]
I'm going to remove a lid from the simmering water.
Finger tighten my jar and then I'm going to be ready to do, [canner clang]
a water bath on my jars. Now this is only going to take a ten minute water
bath whether it was in a pint or a quart. That means I put it in a water bath canner
Which has a rack so that nothing sits on the bottom, completely submerged
in water. When my pot is boiling, and steam is coming out of it, that is with
the lid on, I'll go ahead and process that for ten minutes. And then I've got a
wonderful product to put on the shelf, nice clear pretty juice. I could choose
to drink it right now if I wanted to or I could take and when I had about, four to
six cups extracted I can go ahead and make it into a jam and jelly. Jelly using my
pectins and there's some fun new pectins out there now. Generally, if I'm going to
do grape jelly, I will just a liquid pectin. But I don't have to. I can use new
pectins that have come out. So I can use small batches and I just measure out
how much it takes or I can use a traditional box of pectin that has been
on the market for quite a while.
However I do it, the getting the juice out of the fruit becomes so very easy with a
great juicer. You can see now as it starts to come out, it will cook. What'll I'll
have left, And there's still quite a few grapes, But you can see the grapes start
to lose a lot of their color and eventually, I will just have left in the
bottom, some skins and vines and the juice will be all in the container there.
I could mix juice if I wanted too, I could go ahead and put some pomegranate or
some apples into my juice. I would still need to make sure that I process it
afterwards and it may change colors and be a little bit different but, it's a great
easy way and one that I can let, get going and I don't have to watch it quite so much
for an hour as the juice gets taken out of the grapes. So this is, remember,
a juice steamer, and you purchase it under that, as a steam juicer and you're not
buying the steam canner. This is just a juicer to take juice out of the fruits
and vegeatable. So, have fun with it!