Lets get juicy!

For my birthday earlier this week the lovely Jerry bought me a steam juicer (amongst other things - he goes a bit OTT with presents bless 'im - but always excellent and useful). I first saw one of these gadgets at the Holmgren's place on my PDC, and I was fascinated by it. I was super impressed with Mr Jerry for remembering this and with all his research, as they are not available to buy in Australia that he could find.

I had some peaches from a neighbour, as well as some berries, apricots and a few plums so I decided to give it a trial run today. The juicer has 4 parts - the water reservoir, the juice collector, the basket and the lid. You fill the water reservoir with water (duh :) ) then put the juice collector on top.


Load up the basket with fruit, and put it on top of the juice collector, then put on the lid.


Then you bring the water to the boil, and when it starts to steam a bit through the lid start timing - for my fruit combination it was 60 minutes of steaming. Then you drain off the juice using the tube (with clamp) into sterilised bottles.



The end result was just over 1 litre of juice, and because I removed the stones from the fruit I'll be able to use it for pie or crumble filling or maybe in a chutney. The steamed fruit smells just divine....sorry chickens!!

I can see my brambleberry cordial being replaced by brambleberry juice done this way - a LOT less sugar, and much easier to do.