Steam Juicing Apples and Pears

At long last I processed the pictures from how I used my steam juicer to juice some apples and pears last month. Two caveats: 1) I'm new to this, and 2) this is about the cheapest, smallest, most tinny-looking steam juicer you can buy. I did not want to invest mightily until I was sure this was going to be worthwhile. I think it is, and at some point I will buy a larger one of stainless steel.

Here are the parts of my steam juicer. 1) Water reservoir. 2) Juice pan with siphon tube. 3) Strainer basket. 4) Lid.

First is the water reservoir. This goes directly on the stove and is filled about 2/3 with water.

The juice pan is next.

It has this little wire clip that I don't trust, having learned the hard way that it doesn't do its job very well.

I direct it down into a Mason jar in the pot holder drawer. :o)

You fill the strainer pan with fresh fruit. Here I mixed tart apples with sweet pears. Wash the fruit and trim away any bad spots, but no need to chop, pit or peel. I cut the apples and pears in half or fourths just because, but you probably wouldn't even need to do that much.

Okay, so, we put the lid on and light the stove. We bring the water to a boil, and when steam starts to escape from around the rim of the lid, we turn it down to a simmer. We steam apples for 90 minutes. Here they are after maybe half an hour. Interestingly, the pears are holding their shape better than the apples. Not what I would have guessed.

If you like your juices clear, just let the fruit steam undisturbed. If you prefer it more unfiltered looking (and I do), stir the fruit every so often to break up the fibrous parts and infuse them into the juice. In fact, I pull off the juice and then run it back through the fruit again because I like a LOT of unfiltered stuff in my juice.

After 90 minutes. Wow! That's what's left. The pears had much less residue than the apples did. I was hoping for more, actually. I love pear sauce.

I forgot to take any pictures of the actual siphoning process, but it's just as well, as I burn myself every time anyway, without worrying about juggling a camera. Anyway, it comes out scalding hot, and if you siphon it directly into sterilized bottles or jars, you have a nice clean environment and don't need to water bath process afterward. Here you can see I appropriated some flip-top beer bottles Barry wasn't using. 

The leftover pulp gets run through a chinois strainer to make applesauce. Or, in this case, apple-pear sauce. That you do have to water-bath process, as by the time it's in the jars, it's well below scalding temperature and has been in contact with numerous preparation surfaces (chinois, bowl, spoon, etc.).

Meanwhile, I'm firing up the steamer again, this time with just pears. Don't forget to replenish the water in the water reservoir. You do not want this thing to cook dry.

And here's the yield from two steamer fulls of first apples and pears, then just pears. If I had used all apples, there would have been more yield. This is where you can see how a larger juicer would make sense, as I used a lot of energy doing this twice when one large steamer could probably have held more than the two loads I did.

My thanks to Judy Laquidara who first introduced me to the idea of steam juicing.

netTALK Duo coupon

The netTALK Duo is available for half off (before shipping fees) at the main site through November 15, if you want to give it a try. The coupon code is NTLKCRZYDISC.

Homemade granola recipe

Added to the Recipes page.

Can't wait to slowly accumulate enough 5-gallon buckets?

I found an eBay seller who has very nice, clean used 5-gallon buckets with metal bale handles for sale. His shipping costs are very reasonable, too. The total cost even with shipping was less than it would cost to order new buckets from a plastics company (though these are used, of course, if that matters).

I wrote and asked him about leaving the lids off my order to reduce the shipping weight, since I did not need the lids, and he not only did that, he even reduced the purchase price a bit, which was above and beyond, as I don't know what he would do with the lids alone.

Anyway, check out Jake at StuffForAllSeasons. Good seller, good buckets.

Do you have medical power of attorney for your grown college-aged child?

Judy Laquidara just brought up the necessity for college-aged young adults to have a medical power of attorney that allows their parents or other trusted loved ones to speak to medical caregivers on their behalf should they become incapacitated. Without one, we could not even find out information on Britta were to be in a car accident and hospitalized, for example.


Get your kids a medical power of attorney form, ask them to fill it out, and get it notarized. It's not set in stone, they can change it any time they want, but it's something at least.


Gundersen Lutheran, one of our two  local hospital systems, has this boilerplate MPOA which is sufficient for Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin:

http://www.gundluth.org/upload/docs/Services/2010POA.pdf

In addition, the National Right to Life Committee has information on setting one up for whatever state you live in. It would make sense to have one that satisfies the requirements both of your home state and the state in which your college-aged child is living at present.

We have a new phone number.

I just sent out a giant spammy sort of e-mail to notify friends and family. If you need our number and I missed you, please drop me an e-mail and I'll get it to you.

P.S. Little Miss A was driven to tears over the news that her phone number was changing, because "it's been that way forEVer."

Don't Go Car Shopping While In Labor

Mike and Sara, friends of ours in Wisconsin, were a bit overdue for their second child. Well, she's here NOW. This morning Sara delivered their new little girl in a car dealership parking lot. It was just a convenient place to pull off the road when they realized they were not going to make it to the hospital in time, but I like to think they were car shopping. :o)

Little Annabelle didn't even wait for the paramedics. Mike got to catch her himself.

Welcome, little Annabelle!

LATER: Gundersen Lutheran put the 911 recording on YouTube. Sara and Mike were so awesome!




And here's a news story on them:

Mother Gives Birth in car dealership parking lot on way to hospital

Made apple juice (and applesauce as a byproduct) instead of working this morning.

Work has been pretty slow, and we've been called off in the mornings, when I usually work, to defer our time till later in the afternoon when more rolls in from the western half of the country, and that happened today. So I spent my morning baking bread and also making apple juice with my new steam juicer. (The link is informational; I got mine for quite a bit less money on eBay.)
I still have quite a few tart green apples from the neighbor's tree, and they're great for pies and crisps but not so great for juice, which is supposed to be sweet, so I picked up a couple of pecks of Jonathan apples from Leidel's Apple Stand in La Crescent, and another half bushel from a vendor at the farmer's market there, a pretty red apple with a lovely crunch, called a Scarlett O'Hara. I'm not sure Barry will let me juice those, however; he really likes them as eating apples. I also bought a half bushel of delicious little green pears that aren't all ripe yet, but the ones we have been able to eat have been wonderful.

So anyway, I was turned on to steam juicing by Judy Laquidara. She has many, many good ideas and inspires me. She has a large, stainless steel steam juicer, but I wasn't ready to spend that kind of money since I had never used one before. But I figured this one would be worth its while very quickly considering how many apples there are around here. A steam juicer is sort of like a giant percolator, only it's steam that percolates through the top, not hot water. It has several chambers stacked vertically, starting with water in the bottom, to produce the steam, then a juice collecting chamber, and on the top, a colander for fruit. You put your fruit in the colander part (apples get cut in halves or fourths, but that's all you do, no peeling or coring), put it on the stove and let the water produce steam for awhile. The fruit will cook in the top and release its juice, which drips through the colander into the juice collection chamber, and from there, you can pour it off using a rubber tube. It comes out scalding hot, so you can pour it directly into sterilized bottles or jars and seal it. If you are very gentle with the fruit and don't stir it at all, the juice will be clear, but I like my apple juice to have some fruit in it, so I stirred the fruit around to let some of the solids mix into the juice.

With apples, after you get out all the juice you're gonna get, you are still left with a lot of apple pulp. If you run that through a chinois, then you have applesauce. Sort of a byproduct of juicing. :o) I like applesauce, but I don't love it, and the kids think it's either baby food or something you eat when you're getting over the flu, so it is not a very popular item around here. I'm hoping, since I have so much of it now, to get in the habit of using it in baking. I hear you can substitute apple sauce for oils in baking pretty much one for one and still have moist baked goods without the added fat.

The juice is wonderful, by the way.