apple juice

matt drinks a lot of juice. personally, i am happy with water, wine, and iced tea, but not matt. he needs his sugar, i suppose. 

anyway, after reading a terrifying article about how different kinds of juice are produced, i decided that i wasn’t really okay with him putting a lot of that stuff in his body. this led to a discussion about other options. we ended up deciding to make our own apple juice!!

i have a juicer, but the idea of keeping apples on hand and juicing it as he wants it doesn’t really appeal to matt, so it had to be able to be bottled for later consumption. 

so, last time we were in the okanagan valley, we picked up two of these 20 pound bags of apples (spartan) for about $11 each:

and went to work!

we had big bottles on hand (we make our own beer and wine and we used to use these bottles for beer - now we keg) and the only other equipment required were the juicer, a big pot, and a candy thermometer (i am pretty sure mine came from deal extreme for like $2).

we put our big bottles (sans lids) in the oven (at least 20 minutes at 225 is recommended to sterilize):

and put the lids in the sanitizer solution we use for beer/wine:

we started by washing the apples:

then i quartered and cored them (not entirely sure coring was necessary, but my juicer is not the most powerful thing ever, so i wanted to be safe) and we started juicing:

once we had a big bowl of juice, we poured it through a strainer (not strictly necessary, but matt doesn’t like pulp - it still ended up a little pulpy for his tastes, i think next time we’ll strain it through cheesecloth):

and into the big pot. put it on the stove on med-high and stir constantly until it hits 70 degrees celsius for at least one minute (pasturization!):

once the bottles and juice are as warm as they need to be, ladle the juice into the bottles and seal!

the two bags of apples made a little less then 10 liters of juice, and the pasturization seems to have worked well. we made this a few months ago and it still tastes great!