You are so fond of apple cider that mere mention of this makes your mouth water and you feel irresistibly thirsty to have a sip at once. And you have an apple orchard around you, and every day you encounter the apple-laden branches. To make your thirst more intense, you see fresh apples dropping on the ground and withering uncared. Your look out must be how to make apple cider drink.
In this situation, you may wrongly wonder that you are a cider press away to have those juicy fruits turned into apple cider. If you are under the impression that only cider press can avail you apple cider, you are grossly mistaken. Yes, there is more affordable alternative to quench your thirst and an answer to how to make apple cider with a juicer.
Having heard that, you may have grown impatient to avail a quality juicer and you can have one of your preferences from the market. But there are much to learn about the craft as the matter is not as simple to put apples and beaches into the machine and get apple cider ready to enjoy. It is all about gathering the basic ingredients along with the urgent tools and following the crucial instructions. If this done, you are good to answer how to make apple juice.
Ingredients And Tools To Gather Before Hand
Before you jump on the land and start making your hand dirty, you need to ensure the presence of some basic things around you. The necessities fall into two categories that include the ingredients the cider would be made from and the tools the cider would be made by. Here you go with them.
Ingredients:
The Fruits: Gather sufficient apples – sweet, tart, crab- pears. The amount depends on the target you have set. As for gross guidelines, you need nearly 15 lbs of fruits to make one gallon of cider. And you must be careful that the fruits are organic and fresh.
To speak frankly, better to use the foraged fruits. You should collect as many varieties of apples as you can to keep a balanced flavor. If you keep the sweet apples more than the other variants, the cider will have a sweet flavor. Conversely, to have a sour or tanning flavor, add crab apples in considerable amounts.
Sugar: Outside America, you will not have sweet apples, and so chance is thick that you will have a bitter or sour taste in the end product. Therefore, to keep a balance in the flavor, you may need to add sugar matching the taste you want the cider has. In this case, I suggest organic brown sugar to be a better sweetening alternative.
Yeast: Yeast is one of the crucial elements while the job is to make cider as the cider is not that coveted one unless it is fermented. Here comes the yeast instrumental to turn sugar into alcohol. Not to forget that you will have natural yeast across the skin and surface of the fruits, but these are not to depend on and so you will remove those while washing the fruits before putting into the chute of the juicer.
Tools:
Juicer: Yes, a juicer, not a blender, as it is the sap of the fruit coming from the core and flesh. While any kind of juicer should do, a masticating juicer will make things easier and add to the quality and quantity of the liquid.
Chopping Knife & Cutting Board: You must cut the fruits into smatter chunks so that the juicer can accommodate those. Moreover, you must find infested core to dump them. That may require you plastic or wooden cutting board.
Large Sieve & Muslin Towel: A large sieve is necessary to trap the lump of the fruits from the squeezed liquid. And a fine cloth towel will complete the course by separating the tiniest pulp pieces from the liquid.
Demijohn: A bottle like a container with the capacity of 2-3 gallons.
Others: A funnel to shift the cider from the Demijohn to the swing-top bottle. A shiphon hose, rubber stopper, swing-top bottle, and airlocks.
Instructions For Making Apple Cider Without Cider Press
With the ingredients and required tools in hand, you are half-ready in the line of how to make hard apple cider with a juicer. And this process involves several steps of juicing, refining it through clarifying from sediments and bubbles and rake it to chill for weeks. Here you go with the necessary cider making steps in home.
Give A Thorough Wash To The Fruits
You can wash the fruits merely with water if you want to keep the natural yeast remain where they are. On the contrary, you should apply veggie wash or vinegar to ensure no natural yeast is left with the fruits. While targeting the natural yeast, focus your attention across the surface of the fruit of the apples and whatever fruits you add to them.
Cut The Fruits Into Pieces And Separate The Infested Core
After cleaning the fruits of the yeast and dust, you better cut the fruits into quarters so that the juicer chute can accommodate them conveniently. Before putting the cut fruits into the juicer, you should inspect them closely to find any bug infesting the cores of the fruits. If found, immediately cut out the infested part.
You better have an attentive companion for this to hasten the process. Kids with better knife skills can prove to be the better assistant in this case. And gather the chopped fruits in a bowl near the juicer and you leave the stems or other things to be taken care of by the juicer itself.
It’s time for Juicing
Take the demijohn by your side and now you juice all the fruits targeted for the current batch of apple cider. Every time the juicer pitcher goes full, pour the liquid into the demijohn. The funnel would prove to be extremely effective to pass the squeezed liquid into the demijohn. However, do not forget to sterilize the demijohn beforehand.
Never Leave The Pulp Wet
However efficient the machine is, it cannot squeeze the fruits to make it tinder-dry. You have to make your hand dirty for this. As for pulp squeezing, wait until the pulp container of the juicer gets full to take out the pulp to manually squeeze them.
This is the step the sieve and the kitchen will come in handy. Setting the sieve over a clean bowl, place the towel in the same line. Now, start twisting the pulp edges to wring the left sap in them and release them when it feels dry. Then again, return to juicing again.
Time To Determine The Flavor
Thus you can bring all the fruit sap out of them. And the apple cider may go sweet, sour, or slightly bitter, given the area you have collected the fruits from. Because apples has different varieties leading to various taste. American apples are sweeter than all others; crab apples and tart apples are sour and tanning.
Therefore, if you want a different flavor balancing the natural flavor of the ingredients, you have to check the taste and apply sugar as per the flavor you want.
Now, you have to depend on your guesswork bypassing the machine. Keep in mind that so long the fermentation process lasts, it will eat sugar to turn them into alcohol. And the fruits themselves will produce fructose that is also sugar.
However, adding sugar should not be a headache as you can add more in the later phase. So, be on the minimal while adding sugar as you can add later on, but it can create issues if you mix more than you want.
Refine The Cider And Get Rid Of The Funky Stuff
It is not rare to encounter excessive foam or tiny pulp floating across the top level of the liquid in demijohn. In that case, putting the demijohn in a bowl or on a tray, keep it in a warm place for a day or so.
By that time, the yeast will start their action by creating bubbles. Thus the cider will have three layers – the bubbly and foamy upper part, the pure cider in the middle, and the sediments in the bottom.
The foam will automatically come out of the top. And if you take the cider through a siphon hose, the sediments at the bottom will be separated from the liquid. Thus you can get rid of the funky bubbles, foam, and scum.
Put A Rubber Stopper And Airlock On The Demijohn And Rack-It
With a much cleaner cider, it’s time to rack it but before racking it, ensure that the demijohn is properly attached with a rubber stopper and an airlock. In this step, you can check the flavor again and add some sugar if need be.
Bottle Your Cider
Yes, we have reached the final stage and that is to bottle up the hard cider. Before bottling, you can add some sugar for added carbonization. The better bottle type for this is the swing-top bottle that let pressure that builds up by this go out. And thus, you can avoid glass explosion, and that is a crucial part of how to make apple cider using a juicer.
Takeaway
This is all about how to make apple cider from apple juice without a cider press or using a simple juicer. You may not have the luxury of owning a cider press but that should not deter you from the apple cider intake. Therefore, get some fruits – apples of different varieties and pears to enjoy apple cider at your home.
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