Today I went out and harvested the grapes and pulled off 17 pounds 1 1/2 ounces worth of fruit. All the while, birds were yelling at me "Hey! Where are you going with those!".
So here they are. There are lots of purple, red-purple, and yes, green grapes, but today had to be the day to get them off of the vines or else the birds would have taken them all.
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Whisky helped me bring the grapes inside.
So after picking all of those grapes I called my canning resource, my mom. She said I could juice them today and freeze the juice until I was ready to can. So that's what I did. I juiced those puppies.
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Step 1: Weigh grapes in batches. I was able to get two batches at 7 pounds even and the third and final batch was 3 pounds 1 1/2 ounces.
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Step 2: Remove stems, stems, and more stems.
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Step 3: Reweigh grapes just to see what the stem loss per batch was. Five 1/2 ounces.
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Step 4: Mush grapes (I used the food processor) and put all of the grape mash into a pot, adding 3 cups of water to every 7 pounds of grapes per the Sure Jell (aka Certo) website.
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It looks kind of gross.
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Step 5: Bring this mushed up mess to a boil, cover and simmer for 10 minutes.
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Step 6: Line a strainer with cheese cloth and let this goop strain for a long while. I kept stirring it around because the cheese cloth was clogged with grape debris. Note: At this point the grapes are very, very hot. I managed to splash burn myself a couple of times.
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Step 7: Switch to bigger strainer.
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Step 8: Become impatient and weigh down the cheese cloth mass to squeeze out the remaining juice.
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Step 9: Wait for the juice to cool down.
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Step 10: Will be to transfer the grape juice to 1 gallon Ziploc bags and then freeze it until I need it.
Ta-Daaa!
Here is 1 2/3 gallons of juice. We got three bags of juice with 8 cups and one bag with 2 3/4 cups, so 8+8+8+2 3/4 = 26 3/4 divided by 16 = 1.67 = 1 2/3 gallons.
It comes out to be about a gallon per ten pounds of grapes. Wow.
It would have been less work to just go buy the prepared juice, but where is the fun in that?
I like the Beta memo pad that showed up in some of the pics. You should have thrown that into the pot and cooked it! HA!
Posted by: Christi | September 05, 2007 at 11:31 AM
I'm too lazy to go back and crop it out. :)
Posted by: Christine | September 05, 2007 at 07:29 PM
Great post. I used to do this with wild muscadine grapes and then make grape jelly. Yum! You will enjoy that juice!
Posted by: Leigh | September 05, 2007 at 08:28 PM
Looks good! I find my self wishing that I had access to a grape vine this year.
Posted by: jackie | September 06, 2007 at 07:07 AM