Starting from the beginning. we have a few small berry bushes that we pick every year. We clean off the berries and put them in the deep freeze. Every two or three years or when the deep freeze gets full we juice the berries. The juice is put in bottles and then back in the deep freeze it goes.
We have Nanking cherries, black currant, red currant and somebody always gives us crab apples.
Then over the two or three years we take out a bottle of juice and cook it up and make either a syrup or jelly. You can't beat it.
Now the pioneer way of juicing berries was to cook up the berries and put them in a cloth sack and let the juice drain into a container. This method isn't very efficient as you don't get a lot of juice.
So a long time ago we bought a steam juicer. This gizmo consists of three parts.The bottom part is just pot with water the produces the steam. The middle section is like a big funnel that catches the juice. The top part is a basket which contains the berries. As the steam goes through the berries juice is released . Each basket of different berries has a prescribed steaming time. Once the 50 minutes or whatever time is required we drain the hot juice out of the middle section and catch it in bottles.
So the other day we spent the whole day on the juicing project. Today I had some delicious black currant syrup.
